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A STUDY IN THE PROBLEM OF RACE 


BY 


BASIL MATHEWS 


AUTHOR OF 
Livingstone the Pathfinder, The Riddle of 
Nearer Asia, Argonauts of Faith, etc. 


MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 


OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 
NEW YORK 


Coprricut, 1924, py 
Missionary Epucation Movement 
oF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 


Printed in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGH 

I. Tue Wuite Man anp THE Wor.LpD . : : 1 
II, Tue DitemMMa oF THE PaciFic . ‘ : : 25 
III. “Sometuine New Out or AFRICA” . é i 54 


IV. Tuer Expansion or Inpia . > : ‘ F 80 


V. Tue Wortp Tzam : : 4 : LO 
VI. Tue Reat War . : A : ‘ oat) Sa eee 
BiBLIOGRAPHY : ‘ : : : : ae of he, 
ERR de a Pe Mess. i) yoy) Meal oui tes  waetuh' al HERS 
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AEROPLANE RovutTEs AROUND THE WorLD ~ 14-15 


Tue Paciric Ocean . A : Z : . 30-31 


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AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


THE challenge of Mount Everest and that of the 
Race Problem are closely parallel. They are, both 
of them, in their separate ways, the biggest thing 
in the world. Each has defied man’s efforts. Yet 
each makes an irresistible call to the adventure of 
facing its perils and defying its difficulties. 

The very fact that the new post-war race problem 
is the supreme feature in the world landscape 
today, and that it lies right across the path of the 
onward trek of mankind, makes the attack upon it 
as inescapable for us as it is fascinating. 

To concentrate a discussion of this vast world 
issue within the covers of a small book in a way 
that omits no vital consideration yet keeps a true 
perspective, while on the other hand avoiding the 
dismal dulness of the catalogue, would seem to be 
impossible. Yet no partial picture gives us the 
real dimensions or nature of the menace—and of 
the possibilities—that lie ahead. And it really is 
vital today that we should measure the issue. The 
attempt has therefore been made here. 

The reader will see what is in the book: the 
author is most of all conscious of what he has been 
forced by the rigid limits of inelastic pages to cut 
out. Yet he would not have had the impertinence 


to produce the book if it were not felt that even an 
vii 


Vili THE CLASH OF COLOR 


imperfect attempt to get a vivid, accurate, balanced 
picture of this greatest of all problems confronting 
the new generation may have a real value if only 
as a pathfinder towards a fuller exploration. 

Years of thought, reading, and human contact 
lie behind the book. In addition, the unwearied 
patience of a group of friends who have corporately 
overhauled every page has greatly strengthened it 
in every part. To them the author owes a great 
debt of gratitude. He would also acknowledge 
indebtedness to the intense stimulus of Dr. Lothrop 
Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, the brilliancy 
of whose presentation he admires as strongly as he 
challenges and traverses his conclusions. 

The argument of The Clash of Color first took 
shape in a series of lectures delivered in Belfast 
under the lectureship established by the Presby- 
terian Church in Ireland. 

If this small volume acts only as a porch through 
which the reader will enter on a wider and deeper 
study of the problem, such as will be found in Mr. 
J. H. Oldham’s Christianity and the Race Problem 
and in Mr. Robert E. Speer’s Of One Blood, the 
author will feel that it has fulfilled its function. 


Bast. MATHEWS 
June 1924 


THE CLASH OF COLOR 


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THE CLASH OF COLOR 


CHAPTER I 
THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 


“THE black will never understand the white, nor 
the white the black, as long as black is black and 
white is white.” 

So said Captain Woodward—the hero of one of 
Jack London’s South Sea Tales—in a public house 
under the palm trees looking out over the Apia 
Harbor to the league-long rollers of the Pacific. 

“The crisscross of scars on his bald pate,” writes 
Jack London, “ bespoke a tomahawk intimacy with 
the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertise- 
ment, front and rear, on the right side of his neck, 
where an arrow had at one time entered and been 
pulled clean through.” At the present moment he 
was commander of the Savavi, the big steamer that 
recruited labor from the westward for the planta- 
tions on Samoa. 

“ Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites,” 
said Roberts, pausing to take a swig from his glass. 
“If the white man would lay himself out a bit to— 
understand the workings of the black man’s mind, 


most of the messes would be avoided.” 
1 


2 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


So the argument runs to and fro, when Captain 
Woodward breaks in with a vehement sentence 
that sums up the convietions of multitudes besides 
himself. 

“Don’t talk to me about understanding the 
nigger. The white man’s mission is to farm the 
world, and it’s a big enough job cut out for him. 
What time has he got left to understand niggers 
anyway? ... There’s one thing sure, the white 
man has to run the niggers whether he under- 
stands them or not. It’s inevitable. It’s fate.” 

“ And of course the white man is inevitable—it’s 
the niggers’ fate,” Roberts broke in. “ Tell the 
white man there’s pearl-shell in some lagoon in- 
fested by ten thousand howling cannibals, and 
he’ll head there all by his lonely, with half a dozen 
kanaka divers and a tin alarum clock for chro- 
nometer, all packed like sardines on a commodious 
five-ton ketch. Whisper that there’s a gold strike 
at the North Pole, and that same inevitable white- 
skinned creature will set out at once, armed with 
pick and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest 
patent rocker—and what’s more, he’ll get there. 
Tip it off to him that there’s diamonds on the red- 
hot ramparts of hell, and Mr. White Man will 
storm the ramparts and set old Satan himself to 
pick-and-shovel work.” 

“But I wonder what the black man must think 
of the—the inevitableness? ” asks Jack London. 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 3 


Jack London’s sea-captain, this recruiter of 
colored labor, declares two things with dogmatic 
certainty. He says first that “The black will 
never understand the white, nor the white the 
black,” and secondly, that “ The white man’s mis- 
sion is to farm the world.” 

Is he right? It is of supreme importance that 
we should know. 

Let us take the second half of his tremendous 
statement. This prodigious expansion of the domi- 
nation of the “inevitable white man ” who “farms 
the world,” and the consequent racial upheaval 
against his control have set for the new generation 
in the second quarter of this twentieth century 
the supreme task of its life. Indeed, the sheer 
force of the facts of this world clash of color—as 
we shall try here to face them—drives in on us the 
conviction that no generation has ever been con- 
fronted by an issue so world-wide in its range and 
so decisive for good or ill for the future of man’s 
life on the planet. 


I 


Whether or not it is true that “ the white man’s 
mission is to farm the world,” he is in fact doing 
so on a scale unprecedented in history and with 
revolutionary effects on the life of the races whose 
lands he farms and whose lives he directs. 

A swift moving picture of the last four centuries 


4 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


of history and of the world today will throw into 
relief this astonishing situation. 

If we stand back rather less than five hundred 
years and look out on the world of, say, 1450, we 
discover the white man besieged in the relatively 
small mass of land that we call Western and Cen- 
tral Europe, with the group of British Islands 
lying off the shores of that continent. If he turned 
his head over his shoulder east, he found hanging 
on to his flank the Mongol of the Russian and Cen- 
tral Asian Steppes. If, desiring as he did the trade 
of India, he looked southeast or south, he found, 
from the Danube across Nearer Asia to the Nile 
and from the Nile across North Africa to Gi- 
braltar, the hostile scimitar of the world of Islam 
barring his way. Westward lay the Atlantic 
Ocean—that wild waste of endless waters which 
he had never crossed, which were indeed to him 
the end of the world. 

Literally, then, the white man saw himself in 
that narrow continent encircled by an unbroken 
siege of human enemies and by the impassable 
ocean. 

Suddenly two dramatic adventures not only 
changed the history of the world, but revolution- 
ized the réle of the white man in human affairs. 

In 1492 Columbus, seeking a new route to Asia 
across the Atlantic, stumbled on the breakwater of 
a colossal new continent. In 1498 Vasco da Gama 
—in search of a new route to India—found his 


THE WHITH MAN AND THE WORLD 5 


way round the southernmost promontory of Africa 
into the Indian Ocean and landed at Calicut. The 
white man had broken the barrier of the Atlantic 
and had outflanked the forces of Islam by the 
tremendous detour of the Cape of Good Hope—two 
stupendous achievements that were to alter the 
destiny of man. He had at once discovered a 
“ New World” and had made the oceans 


“a pathway to the ends of the earth.” 


The siege was broken. 

From that hour for more than four centuries an 
incessant tide of expansion of the white man’s 
dominance has flowed across the world from 
Britain and West Central Europe. It is a move- 
ment so wonderful that we shall search all re- 
corded history without discovering a parallel 
either in geographical range or revolutionary re- 
sults on the human race. Rome, indeed, ruled the 
races of the world of its day; but the known world 
of the Cesars was a miniature compared with ours. 

The white man proceeded first to dominate and 
then to occupy and develop the New World. Red 
Indians and buffaloes roamed then over the prairies 
of America; but the Spaniards and the Portuguese, 
the Dutch and the French, streamed across the At- 
lantic; while Grenville, Hawkins, Raleigh, and 
Drake swept out from the Devon coast “ Westward 
Ho” in search of adventure and galleons of gold. 
Settlements of daring pioneers began to fringe the 


6 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


eastern coast of North America. Gradually, step 
by step, the white man blazed his trail westward 
through the forests, hewed a clearing, built his 
shack, spread his plantations, until from the At- 
lantic to the Pacific and from Polar Ice to the 
Gulf of Mexico his rule became absolute. He 
created the new nation of the United States and 
the commonwealths of Newfoundland and Canada. 
The white man now farmed the New World. 
Meanwhile the sturdy “ merchant adventurers ” 
in their oak ships were doubling the Cape of Good 
Hope to plant their settlements in Fort William 
(Calcutta) and Fort St. George (Madras), Surat 
and Bombay, and were developing their trade in 
spices and silks, timber and cottons. The first 
consideration in those early days was the treasure 
chest of the East India Company. But one Indian 
prince after another put himself under the protec- 
tion of the Company as against his warring 
neighbor, while Clive fought Dupleix as a part of 
that tense struggle between France and Britain 
which then stretched across the world from Quebec 
to India. By processes that were certainly neither 
foreseen nor organized, some three hundred mil- 
lion people of India and Burma came within the 
pax Britannica, from the Khyber and the passes 
of the Himalayas down to Cape Comorin and. 
Ceylon, and from Rangoon across to Bombay. 
While this was going on Captain Cook and his 
tough sailor-men in their ships, well named The 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE “WORLD % 


Resolution and The Adventure, set out from 
Plymouth in 1772 on one of the most romantic 
and adventurous quests that men have ever made. 
Through his voyages and those of the men who 
followed him, those lovely island groups of the 
Pacific Ocean dawned on the horizon. And a new 
continent—Australia—with the large islands of 
New Zealand opened their harbors to the ships 
that came sailing out of the West. 

The white man was by this time farming half 
America, a great part of Asia and all Australasia. 

Yet the vastest territory of all still remained 
barely touched. South Africa was already the 
home of Dutch and British settlers. Protected, 
however, partly by her stupendous bulk, yet even 
more by the myriad tiny lances of the fever mos- 
quito, Africa—as a whole—still held her secret. 
The white man had raided her coasts for slaves 
and ivory and gold to enrich himself, but had not 
seriously invaded the real body of Africa. 

Now, however, Mungo Park, Baker, Barth, 
Speke, Burton, Grant, and—greatest of all—David 
Livingstone, in journeys of epic heroism never ex- 
celled either in legend or in life, opened up the 
mysterious heart of Africa and showed to an aston- 
ished world, rivers and forests, lakes and veldt, and 
resources of soil, of mineral wealth, and of man- 
hood such as the white man had never dreamed of 
in his wildest thoughts. He immediately rushed in 
with his capital, his energy, and his organizing 


8 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


capacity and began to “farm the world ” of Africa. 

With the exception of the Far East—China and 
the Japanese Empire—and parts of South Amer- 
ica, the white man in those centuries has with the 
irresistible “ drive ” of his energetic expansion dis- 
covered for himself, opened up, and then taken 
under his control, all the continents of the world. 

By the technical miracles of modern science, of 
transport of goods, and of ideas, the cable and 
“wireless,” the giant liner and the transconti- 
nental railways, and those children of the internal 
combustion engine and the electric spark—the 
motor car, the truck, the aeroplane, and the motor 
plow—the white man has carried his control into 
the secret recesses of every continent. He has 
farmed the world by controlling the labor of men 
of every race under the sun. The hands of Af- 
ricans, Asiatics, and Islanders produce the rubber 
and the gold, the cotton and the oils, the foods 
and the fabrics of every land, and pour this gath- 
ered wealth into the lap of the West. 

That is the history of those four astounding 
centuries. 

To gather the whole story into a single picture in 
our own day, let us look at the world scene from 
an aeroplane. 

Two young men—brothers glorying in the name 
of Smith—were flying during the war, the one—in 
a giant Handley-Page, night-bombing the enemy— 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 9 


over Palestine with General Allenby, the other on 
the western front. They determined after the 
Armistice to fly to Australia. 

Starting from the Hounslow aerodrome near 
London, they flew, via Paris, Lyons, and Naples, to 
Cairo; thence via Baghdad, Basra, and Delhi to 
Calcutta; and via Rangoon, Singapore, Batavia, 
and Port Darwin to Sydney and Adelaide. Less 
than a hundred and ninety hours in the air had 
carried them almost half-way round the world. 
Yet throughout the whole of that stupendous jour- 
ney of 14,000 miles Ross and Keith Smith were 
flying over territories dominated by the white 
races of the world. From Cairo onward to Ade- 
laide they would be covering throughout—apart 
from the fringe of Siam and the Dutch East Indies 
—territory of the British Empire. 

Supposing that—unsated by this achievement— 
the brothers had flown again from Adelaide to 
New Zealand, and had run across the Pacific, land- 
ing, say, in Fiji, the Samoan Islands, Rarotonga, 
and Tahiti to South America, scaling the rampart 
of the Andes, and running north by Peru, Ecuador, 
and Colombia to Central America; if rising thence 
the giant Vickers had turned northward up the 
thousands of miles of the Mississippi, over the 
illimitable prairies and the violently vigorous 
cities of the United States and, crossing the bor- 
der, had run the gauntlet between the great lakes 
of Canada and her wheat lands, and from New- 


10 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


foundland home to Britain, she would again have 
flown over territory all dominated—and mainly 
inhabited—by the white races, whether Anglo- 
Saxon or Latin. 

To pile still higher the astonishing story let us 
follow the route on which another ’plane—the 
Silver Queen—started with Dr. Chalmers Mitchell 
on board. The ’plane left the Nile delta and 
swung away southward, up the Nile over the 
Sudan, and across into Uganda. If the journey 
had been completed past the Lakes, or over the 
Tanganyika territory and the upper waters of the 
vast river Congo, down over the forest and veldt 
of the Rhodesias, and so across South Africa to 
Cape Town, throughout that tremendous journey 
across desert, swamp, forest, lake, and veldt, her 
wings would pass over thousands of miles of land, 
every inch of the way under the rule of the British 
race. 

The figures are staggering. There are on the 
earth some fifty-three million square miles of 
habitable land surface. Of those miles forty- 
seven million are under white dominance—or 
nearly nine tenths of the whole habitable area of 
the world. Of the remaining six million square 
miles over four million square miles are ruled by 
the yellow races—the Chinese and the Japanese, 
the latter now having sway over Korea, Formosa, 
and the Pacific Islands that Germany used to 
govern north of the Equator. 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 11 


Of all this vast area of forty-seven million 
square miles controlled by the white races, by far 
the greater part is under the hand of the English- 
speaking peoples. Of every seven people in the 
British Empire six are colored. 

This white leadership of the world is the domi- 
nating feature in the world’s political landscape. 
We take it for granted. Yet, as we have seen, it 
is, when viewed across the vast perspectives of 
history, a modern growth. 

What has produced it? Can it survive? Ought 
it to persist? 


II 


If we ask what produced the white man’s expan- 
sion of power through the world, we find a be- 
wildering but fascinating array of answers. 

The very fact that the siege of Islam forced the 
white man to take to the ocean, drove him also to 
begin inventing new instruments for navigation, 
and so led on to new sciences of mathematics, 
astronomy, engineering construction, medicine, and 
so on; and created that intellectual inquisitiveness 
and inventiveness which are, when you get down 
to the roots, the central creative forces of the new 
world. This inventive spirit gave us young James 
Watt poring over the steaming kettle, George 
Stephenson with his engine, and the brilliant 
stream of inventors down to Edison and Marconi 


12 THH CLASH OF COLOR 


and the rest. Those inventions, in turn, created 
the industrial revolution, wherever there were 
coal and iron to be found, in Britain and then on 
the Continent of Europe and in America. 

The industrial revolution made a prodigious 
growth of wealth. The population simultaneously 
increased enormously. This gave to the white man 
an irresistible head of steam that drove his civili- 
zation at top speed across the world. New mil- 
lions of mouths to feed and bodies to clothe made 
it necessary to get and to farm territory on which 
not only to live, but to grow the food and fabrics 
for his homeland. He must “farm the world ”— 
for the raw material for his suits and her frocks 
and their food. 

The wealth beyond the dreams of Croesus that 
has flowed in from Asia and Africa has, in turn, 
clamored to be used to make more wealth. So the 
money was built into ever larger and swifter 
liners to speed over all the oceans, longer and 
better railways and more powerful engines to rush 
across the continents, machines for plowing up and 
planting vaster acres in all the countries of the 
world, and improved spinning machines and looms 
on which to make the world’s clothing. 

This development of transport and of farming 
and mining is one of the magic stories of the 
world. We take it for granted. The savage sees 
it more truly when he opens eyes and mouth in 
gasping amazement at the “white man’s ju ju.” 


THH WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 13 


Look at one or two pictures of the transition. 

As Stanley strode into Ujiji, when he discovered 
Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, he 
handed him a bag of letters. Livingstone when he 
tore them open discovered that the dates at the 
head of the letters were two years old. It had 
taken two years for those messages to reach him! 
The time-distance now for a message from London 
to Lake Tanganyika is to the wireless telegrapher 
a fortieth of a second. 

It took Livingstone years of trudging—facing 
fever and hunger, spears and arrows, wild beasts 
and the angered, hunted men of Africa—before he 
reached the Lake. ‘Today the traveler can cross 
Europe in a sleeping-car, board a luxurious liner 
on the Mediterranean that lands him at Dar es 
Salaam, and climb straight up by railway in a 
comfortable compartment to the shore of Lake 
Tanganyika in a month from leaving London. 

As a small black boy, Khama of the Bamangwato 
trotted out by his father’s side to meet the young 
explorer David Livingstone, trudging on foot into 
unknown Africa; as an old man, that great African 
Chief after the War prepared an aerodrome for 
the Silver Queen’s trial flight. 

The air has become the universal shoreless ocean 
for the flying routes of humanity, and the ether, 
the channel through which a man speaking in New 
York can be heard in London and his words be 
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16 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


more quickly than the sound of his voice can reach 
the back gallery of the hall in which he stands. 
And we are soon to be able to see the man himself 
by teleopsis simultaneously as he speaks to us 
across ten thousand miles. 

A revolution is already being worked in the life 
of men by the annihilation of space. It is swiftly 
breaking up old ways of thought and old habits of 
life. The son of the stone-age Papuan, as he drives 
the motor-boat that he has built with his own 
hands into Port Moresby to get the wireless news 
of the world, has leaped in a generation a gulf as 
wide as that which separates a twentieth-century 
undergraduate from neolithic man. 

What has been done is, however, nothing hye what 
can and will be done. If man throws off the para- 
lyzing fears of war and makes his frontiers links 
instead of barriers, he will by wireless, aeroplane, 
and rail services make his life one with that of alt 
the world. Railway traffic will shoot across con- 
tinents from ocean to ocean, following examples 
already set by Canada and the United States of 
America and Russia. For instance, when the 
Channel Railway Ferry system is working from 
Britain to the Continent and across the Bosphorus, 
as well as across one or two African lakes, it will 
be possible to take a through car from London to 
Cape Town, via Damascus and the Sinai desert, 
by an all-land route running on the soil of three 
continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa. The rail- 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 17 


way engineer, too, has his vision already across 
Central Asia via Bokhara, first eastward to Shang- 
hai, and then southward via Bengal and Burma, 
to the untapped wealth of the Malay States. Thus 
the tremendous resources of central and western 
China—greater probably than those of any land in 
the world, with the possible exception of the 
United States—and the opulence of the soil of 
Africa, will soon all be linked up with Europe by 
rail through the Near East. 

A central European air service can reach India 
in three days, while the shadow of the aeroplane’s 
wings could glide over the roofs of Hankow within 
two hundred hours of leaving Paris. 

If, with these modern miracles of transport of 
men and ideas, foods and fabrics, in our mind, we 
revolve a globe slowly in our hands, we see that 
every problem that we can think of is now not 
simply a national, or even a continental, but a 
world problem. As General Smuts has said: ‘‘ The 
cardinal fact of geography in the twentieth century 
is the shortening of distances and the shrinking of 
the globe. The result is that problems which a cen- 
tury or even fifty years ago were exclusively Euro- 
pean now concern the whole world.” 


lil 


Of these world problems the first, the greatest, 
the most momentous on every ground is the very 


18 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


one that is created by the white man’s expansion 
which has caused him to “farm the world.” It is 
the race problem. 

World transport of foods, fabrics, and ideas has 
made the whole world one body; it has broken 
down age-long divisions and brought us: all to- 
gether. The railway and the steamship are like the 
pulsating arteries in a body carrying the blood of 
humanity to and fro; the cables and the wireless 
are like the nerves, flashing ideas from brain to fin- 
ger and foot, and sensations from limb back to 
brain. 

When the schoolboys of A.p. 2200 read in their 
textbooks about this age of ours, they will discover 
that in our century for the first time in all human 
history “all nations of men that dwell on the face 
of the whole earth ” were bound up in the bundle of 
life together. 

If we—armed with binoculars—were looking 
down to the earth from the two aeroplanes whose 
journeys were described earlier in this chapter, we 
should see, as they droned above the heads of the 
peoples, startled faces lifted to us—first white, then 
in Asia brown and yellow and darker brown, and in 
Africa deeper and deeper browns toning to black. 
In our swift flight we should get a strong impres- 
sion of the contrasts of the races of the world, 
based partly on color differences: the white Euro- 
pean, the bearded olive-faced Jew, the swarthy, 
tawny, desert Arab, the teeming brown myriads of 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 19 


India, the yellow Chinese and Japanese, the dark- 
skinned, passionate-hearted Melanesians of the 
western South Pacific, the brown, laughter-loving 
Polynesians of the eastern South Pacific, the rem- 
nant of the few remaining Red Indians of America, 
the almost black Negroes of America and of the 
veldt and forest and lakeside in Africa—a fascinat- 
ing, ever moving human kaleidoscope of color. 

This kaleidoscope, however, as we look into it, is 
shot through with strange, electric flashes. Vehe- 
ment ambitions for a new place in the world thrill 
through the nerves both of primitive peoples like 
the Africans and of ancient civilizations like those 
of India and China. The foreign pages of any daily 
paper that really gives the news of the world are 
like the charts of a seismographic observatory— 
they record world-wide upheavals, nationalistic 
earthquakes, and racial tidal waves. Headlines 
like: “ Swarajists’ New Move in India ”—“ Mélée 
of Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem ”—*“ Africans, 
Indians, and the White Settler in Kenya ”—“ Race 
Rioting in Chicago”—“ Students’ Outrage in 
Cairo ”—reveal the sensational explosions of a pro- 
found and world-wide upheaval that affects every 
race. 

The upheaval as we know it is relatively new; 
yet it has clearly defined stages in its swift dra- 
matic growth. It began when, exactly four cen- 
turies after Columbus and Vasco da Gama started 
the great age of white expansion, a Japanese ad- 


20 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


miral went back to his country with the report that 
the British was the best navy in the world, and a 
Japanese general simultaneously reported that the 
best army in the world was that of the German 
Empire. Japan then started her astoundingly 
swift and efficient adoption of Western ways of 
war and commerce. That Japanese movement 
changed history. It challenged and ended the 
white man’s expansion. It reared a huge “ No tres- 
passers ” notice across Asia in the face of the white 
man’s advance. For the victory won by little 
Japan over great Russia in 1904, after the battle of 
Port Arthur, was the end of an age and the begin- 
ning of a new era. It stopped the white man from 
carving up the Far East as he had partitioned 
Africa. 

In the Great War just ten years later, the white 
man turned upon himself in what was, to the 
wondering Asiatic, a stupendous white civil war. 
The white man’s hypnotic authority, which was 
undermined by Japan’s victory, crashed in moral 
ruin in the war of 1914-1918. All the races were 
drawn into it as allies of the white man on one 
side or the other. Over a million Indians volun- 
tarily enlisted ; scores of thousands of Africans and 
American Negroes went to Europe and took part in 
the war; the Japanese navy was in from the begin- 
ning; Arabs on the one side fought Turks on the 
other, both under white generalship; Senegalese, 
Annamese, and Malagasy, Maori and South Sea 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 21 


Islanders joined in; and over a hundred thousand 
Chinese laid roads, drained marshes, built huts and 
cut down trees behind the lines in France. Their 
disillusionment was widespread; the white man 
and his civilization came under universal criticism. 
When the Armistice came and all the survivors 
streamed back to the Punjab and the Deccan, to 
the north plain of China and the cities and planta- 
tions of America, to the African veldt and the 
island villages, their lands were filled with the ex- 
periences of all the races in the white man’s war. 

Meanwhile President Wilson had proclaimed 
across the roof-tops of the world the principle of 
“self-determination ” as the central war aim of 
the Allies. “ Self-determination ”’ was trumpeted 
by the propaganda departments of the govern- 
ments in every part of the world. It was translated 
into the languages of India, into Turkish, Arabic, 
Chinese, and Japanese. The Allies, indeed, had in 
mind the self-determination of Belgium, of Serbia, 
of Poland, and so on. The Irishman, however, 
shouted it in Erse—“Sinn Fein.” The Indian 
simultaneously translated self-determination into 
“Swaraj.” The Arab quickened to the “ Pan- 
Arabian” dream. Students in the University in 
Cairo and in London restaurants thrilled to the 
ery of “Egypt for the Egyptians.” Negroes in 
America and in Africa felt for the first time in the 
story of their people a consciousness of race unity. 
In the Far East not only did the slogan “ Asia for 


22 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


the Asiatic ” resound, but in the Peace Conference 
at Versailles, Japan made herself the spokesman 
of the claim of equal rights for the Asiatic along- 
side the Western white in the international sphere. 

The colors of these peoples are different, out 
their voice is one. It is the voice of the great 
racial upheaval; the desire, or rather the deter- 
mination, of the peoples to grasp and to keep the 
control of their own destinies. 

The leadership of these peoples is as varied as 
the poles asunder. You have a leader like Kemal 
Pasha hammering at the doors of Europe and 
carrying the emblems of the scimitar and crescent. 
At the other extreme you find a simple, saintly 
mystic Gandhi, with the emblems of the spinning- 
wheel and the homespun cap. Then you have a 
man like the brilliant American Negro writer, 
W. E. Burghardt DuBois, whose Darkwater and 
whose oratory and journalism have stimulated a 
movement among the Negroes of America—as in 
Africa itself—to make the Negro consciousness 
stand out defiantly against the white man, and 
refuse to be dominated. 

White men say, “ Our civilization is the higher.” 
To this the other races make reply, some by point- 
ing with derision to the moral debacle of world 
war; others with the declaration, ‘Only through 
freedom have you won the power to be great, and 
we must have that same freedom.” White men de- 


THE WHITE MAN AND THE WORLD 23 


clare that if the other races try to rule themselves, 
they will make tragic, catastrophic blunders. To 
this the others say, “‘ Even if we make blunders and 
stumble and fall, they shall be our blunders from 
which we suffer and not—as now—yours.” 

In any case, the old authority of the white man 
in the sense of its automatic acceptance by the 
other races as inevitable and enduring has ended. 
It received its coup de grdce in 1923 when the 
Turkish people (totaling little more than the 
population of Greater New York) recovered from 
colossal defeat, drove the Greeks into the sea, and 
held all Europe at bay diplomatically at Lausanne, 
till they had dictated terms to the world powers. 
The Treaty of Lausanne was discussed in every 
bazaar in India, by the night fires of Arab sheiks, 
and in student debates from Cairo to Delhi, Pe- 
king, and Tokyo. 


So as we look across the world everywhere we 
see the rise, and hear the murmur and the fret, of 
this stupendous tide of racial movement on the 
shores of humanity. 

The white man has indeed found it to be his 
destiny “to farm the world.” But in the process 
he has stirred the races of the world into new life. 
He still controls the governing machinery and most 
of the productive industry of the world; but his 
rule is challenged. Some men of the other races 


24. THE CLASH OF COLOR 


would fight him. Others would work with him. 
Few, however, would be ready to carry on indefi- 
nitely under his unqualified authority. 

Permanently to resist the claim of the other 
races for new power would lead to world war. To 
accept it swiftly without qualification would lead 
to chaos. Is there a way out of this impasse? 
What basis, if any, is possible for a world order in 
which all the just rights and needs of every race 
would be met? 

It is to the discussion of that vital world-wide 
issue—the most tremendous that has ever faced any 
generation of men—that we now set ourselves. 


CHAPTER II 
THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 
J 


WHEN the molten earth, whirling through space, 
flung off the moon, we can imagine the stupendous 
burning crater that was made in the planet. 

Men today, gazing at the map of the world and 
from it to the moon in the sky, have seriously sug- 
gested that the Pacific Ocean—that most enormous 
of all the earth’s waters—covers the cavity left by 
the satellite. This rather wild theory, small as its 
scientific value may be, at least lights up for us the 
first fundamental fact about the Pacific Ocean—its 
‘vastness. 

Our atlases conspire to confuse us in this matter. 
They divide the world into two hemispheres, with 
the division usually running down the middle of 
the Pacific. So we see only half of it at a time. 
But if we take a globe of the world and mentally 
cut it into two halves from pole to pole like a des- 
sert orange, across from Cape Horn on the right * to 
Singapore on the left, we at once see the prodigious 
range of that ocean. No wonder Robert Louis 
Stevenson—who lived for many years and died on 

1 See map on pages 30-31, which should be referred to through- 


out this chapter. 
25 


26 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


one of its loveliest islands—called the Pacific Ocean 
“this desert of ships.” 

The Pacific is, indeed, itself almost a hemisphere. 
The actual world of the Pacific, with its American, 
Australasian, and Asiatic shores, is a hemisphere. 
Its waste of waters dwarfs the Atlantic in range. 
For instance, from Liverpool across the Atlantic 
to New York is only 3050 miles, whereas it is three 
times as far from Yokohama across the Pacific to 
Valparaiso, 9340 miles. 

Looked at from north to south the Pacific 
stretches practically from Pole to Pole; the waters 
roll from Arctic to Antarctic ice across the blazing 
Equator. The area of the waters of the Pacific is 
far larger than the land surface of the entire planet. 
In this immense expanse of seventy million square 
miles, island systems that would loom large else- 
where are like tiny clumps of marguerites in a stu- 
pendous meadow. 

So immense an ocean—with its opposite shores 
separated by such vast distances—has through the 
centuries of past history had almost no trans- 
oceanic intercourse. The merchants from China 
were trading with Africa through Zanzibar two 
thousand years ago, but the very existence of Amer- 
ica was a vague legend borne back to them by a 
handful of daring Japanese sailors. But today, 
through liners and electric cables, cargo tramps and 
wireless, the life of all the shores of the Pacific is 
being linked up, as closely as were the shores of the 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 2%, 


Mediterranean Sea in the day of ancient Greece. 
That linking-up throws up for this generation the 
greatest and the most bewildering of its racial 
enigmas. 

If we took our stand at the only place from 
which the whole Pacific would be visible—on the 
moon itself—and looked down when she shone 
over all the shores of that ocean, what should we 
see? 

Concentrating our vision through a powerful 
glass, we should discover first, as we gazed on the 
land behind the earthquake-shattered harbor of 
Yokohama, the teeming millions of Japan. In 
those small islands, whose area of 148,000 square 
miles is little greater than the 121,000 square miles 
of Great Britain and Ireland, we should see tilling 
the land, toiling in the factories, buying and selling 
in the streets, and sitting at desks in colleges and 
schools, fifty-six million people as compared with 
forty-seven million in the British Isles. When we 
recall that owing to her mountains only one acre 
of every six in Japan can be cultivated for crops, 
and that six out of every ten Japanese work on 
the land itself, we can see how congested her popu- 
lation is. 

We swing our telescope from Japan across the 
peninsula of Korea—which is a part of the Japan- 
ese Empire, where she rules ten million peasants 
—and the great port of Vladivostok comes into our 
field of vision, recalling the immense latent energies 


28 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


of Russia and Russia’s interests in the Pacific. 
Our glass moves on across China. We discover in 
that single: area one quarter of the human race. 
They swarm in unnumbered millions across the 
plains of China and up the gorges to the highlands, 
with their wonderful resources of men and minerals 
—resources before the wealth of which the imagina- 
tion breaks down. They throng in congested mil- 
lions in the cities. Crowded off the land, they even 
populate the very rivers—as at Canton—with cities 
of folk living by the hundred thousand in house- 
boats on the water. 

Out of a world population computed at one 
thousand eight hundred millions Japan and China 
contribute between them some five hundred mil- 
lions; hardy, industrious, capable of marching long 
distances on little rations, with a high capacity for 
organization. And these prodigious masses of 
Asiatic men and women have at their command, 
especially in China, resources of coal, iron, and 
other mineral products exceeding those of any na- 
tion on earth—even of the United States. There 
is, for instance, enough coal already geologically 
surveyed in China to supply for centuries the whole 
human race at its present rate of consumption. 

Swinging our field of vision still farther west- 
ward, we cover India, which—although geograph- 
ically not upon the shores of the Pacific Ocean— 
is, nevertheless, in strategy and commerce linked up 
with increasing closeness by the new trend of world 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 29 


affairs to the whole life of the Pacific. Here and 
in Burma we see three hundred and twenty million 
folk of the Indian world, brought by a strange des- 
tiny into the closest interdependence with the Brit- 
ish people. As our eye, running southeast, follows 
the alluring islands of the Dutch East Indies—like 
Java, the most densely populated area in the world 
—and British Malaysia, we discover lands thickly 
inhabited by peoples of mixed Indian, Mongol, 
Arabian, and Oceanic types. They bring the total 
of the peoples which we have seen on this Asiatic 
side of the Pacific to nearly a thousand million, or 
far more than half of the human race. 

Asia is thus a congested continent. She may 
give relief to her pent up peoples some day by the 
development of the areas of Manchuria, Mongolia, 
and eastern Siberia. But today she is a bowl whose 
millions are spilling over the Pacific brim. 


II 


Through the previous centuries of historic time 
these peoples of farther Asia have remained rela- 
tively quiet in an unchanging life governed by cus- 
tom. Remote from all racial competition and na- 
tionalistic ambition, the tree of their civilization 
grew quietly, driving strong roots into their own 
deep soil. Their civilization has been one of cus- 
tom and not of change. John Stuart Mill, exag- 
gerating a truth, said: “The greater part of the 


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PACIFIC 


32 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


world has, properly speaking, no history, because 
the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the 
case over the whole East.” Since Mill wrote those 
words, however, world history has changed. Today 
irresistible new forces are shattering custom and 
driving the peoples of Asia with increasing speed 
and momentum into new life. 

In less than half a century the new world force 
which we sum up in the phrase “ modern inven- 
tions,” backed by the restless hunger of the West 
for commerce, has begun to transform the trend 
of the life of Asia from tradition and custom to 
initiative and change. They have broken the three- 
thousand-year-old traditions of the Far East. 

In Kobe and Osaka in Japan, in Shanghai, 
Hankow, and other centers in China, hundreds of 
creat factories belching smoke from forests of chim- 
neys employ Japanese and Chinese men, women 
and children in numbers that now total three or 
four millions, and are increasing every day. Mod- 
ern industry has drawn millions from the village 
plow and cottage spinning-wheel which have sus- 
tained their ancestors for at least four thousand 
years. Asiatic people all day and all night in never 
closing factories spin and weave the cotton and silk 
of our fabrics. They make electric light bulbs at 
a fraction of the cost of those made in the West. 
In iron works, with a frontage half a mile long, 
they produce pig iron in gigantic blast furnaces 
eighty feet high at prices that undercut the prod- 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 33 


ucts of Pittsburgh. The clanging shipyards of 
Kobe in Japan, the blazing furnaces and the steam 
hammers of the Hanyeh-ping Steel Works in China 
—enormous as they are—represent mere travelers’ 
samples of those countries’ amazing resources of 
minerals and fabrics and human capacity. 

The leap of Japan into world power,’ with her 
brilliant navy and army, her splendid universities, 
her fine educational system, and her growing labor 
movements, is the most lively and spectacular of 
all these developments. 

Young Japan, full-armed in the arena of the new 
world, has stirred race ambitions through all Asia. 
Seething ideas from all the continents have quick- 
ened the ferment. Bolshevism, Christianity, na- 
tionalism, the race for money, the passion for sport 
—all are pressing on the young mind of new Asia, 
on students and laborers and clerks alike. 

The printing presses of the East pour out these 
ideas every week in many millions of copies of 
newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines. 
In China alone there are now over a thousand 
periodicals being published all the year round.’ 
Crossing the Deathline, the autobiographical novel 
of Japan’s great young Christian labor leader, 
Kagawa, ran through three hundred editions be- 
tween 1920 and 1924. A single magazine, La Jeu- 
nesse, in Peking, run by a group of young thinkers, 


1See Chapter I. 
2See The China Year Book. 


34 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


has stimulated and been the center of a renaissance 
movement which is leading the student life of China 
to challenge in intellectual combat every tradition, 
not only of Western civilization, but of China 
itself. 

A Chinese man returning recently to China from 
America went to a bookstall and bought a copy of 
every new magazine that had been founded during 
his absence. There were forty-seven. He took 
them to his rooms and spent the night overhauling 
them. He says: “There were more up-to-date 
things discussed and a wider range of opinions ex- 
pressed in these magazines than any combination 
of forty-seven magazines picked up from American 
newspaper stands would contain.” 

A strange symptom of this rush of new ideals 
into the old life is that the very languages of the 
East are absorbing the newest words of the West— 
words and phrases for which there is no equivalent 
in the East, which, however, the East must use be- 
cause of the new world into which she is so swiftly 
moving. For example, in Japanese books today you 
will find such words as clinic, survey, efficiency 
test, settlement, welfare work, infant mortality, 
birth-rate, turn-over, industrial democracy, strike, 
Labor Union, sabotage, and so on. 

The greatest of all these forces of change is the 
quietest—education. In Japan alone some eight 
million boys and girls go daily to school under one 
of the finest educational systems in the world. 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 35 


The universities, like—among others—the Imperial 
University at Tokyo and the fine Doshisha Chris- 
tian University, have their thousands of students. 
The same is increasingly true of China, which, for 
instance, in Peking University, Shantung Chris- 
tian University, and Canton Christian College, has 
equipment that ranks with the universities of the 
West. The student life of China has become so 
powerful that, when they revolted in the “ Chinese 
Students’ Patriotic Movement ” against members 
of their own government, who had sold to Japan 
China’s rights in the Shantung settlement at the 
end of the war, they triumphed in spite of imprison- 
ment and torture. The merchants followed the 
students; the laborers joined, and the Chinese 
Government had to give way. That wonderful 
revolt is unique in the history of the world’s under- 
graduate life, and is an index of the vigorous uncon- 
ventionality and power of young China. And it is 
important to note that it was a conscious national- 
istic movement for self-determination. 

Hundreds of millions of Asiatics, men and 
women, are, of course, still scratching the soil of the 
East with the old primitive plow and spinning 
their flax in their tiny cottages just as they did 
three thousand years ago. But even they are now 
beginning to feel “the wind on the heath ”—the 
new ideas that are blowing where they list through 
the world. Here, once again, modern inventions 
hasten the process. Even the illiterate, unreading 


36 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


masses are influenced. A new Chinese script has 
for instance been invented and adopted by the 
Government, so simple that a village peasant can 
learn it quickly. After three weeks in bed, say, in 
a mission hospital with nothing else to do, he can 
go out from the hospital, back to his village, able to 
read to his wide-eyed, wondering neighbors the 
New Testament that he has in his pocket and any 
news of the world that comes to him printed in the 
modern script. 

Even people who cannot read at all are having 
their minds changed. In some parts of the Far 
East there are more motion picture theaters in pro- 
portion to the population than there are in London. 
And the film tells to the people of every Asiatic 
race in the language that any man, woman, or child, 
however ignorant, can understand—+.e., the lan- 
guage of the picture—the story of the world’s life. 
The “ Deadwood Dick ” Wild West cowboy type of 
film has so stung the imagination of the Chinese 
boy of sixteen that he has been firing off revolvers 
in Buffalo Bill’s best style, and a censorship has 
had to be established in some centers to stop the 
import of this sort of drama. The film flickers 
before the eyes of the East not only the wild feats 
of Western cowboys, the antics of Charlie Chaplin, 
the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, and Sherlock 
Holmes, but the race conflict—as in the prize-fight 
between the Negro Siki and the Frenchman Car- 
pentier—and the passionate romances of the West, 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC Ot 


that degrade the white woman in the eyes of the 
East. He contemplates with oriental reflectiveness 
the battle scenes of the Somme and the surrender of 
the German navy. Behind those impassive, in- 
scrutable faces, as they sit in their theaters or study 
in their classrooms, the new thoughts of the West 
are creating fresh ambitions for the East. 

It is then broadly true to say—on all these and 
other grounds—that all the peoples on the Pacific 
seaboard of Asia are swinging out of their ancient 
seclusion and away from their ancestral ways into 
the full tides of the world’s life. Did ever richer 
Armada sail out to new adventure on the waters of 
time? 

At the head of that movement sails Japan— 
the enigma of the Pacific; rich, confident, radiating 
an intellectual freshness, happy in her new-found 
authority in the world. Yet she retains the fine 
sporting traditions from her old fighting Samurai 
leadership with its Bushido system so curiously 
parallel to the knighthood of King Arthur’s Round 
Table. Men wondered sometimes if Japan might 
become the new Prussia of the East—for an arro- 
gant militarism of the mailed fist type dominated 
her councils for some years. The baffling problems, 
however, of the new labor-millions in the factories 
and slums of Kobe, Osaka and Tokyo, and the swift, 
urgent rising tide of young international thought 
is with irresistible pressure ousting that old, cruder 
militarism. 


38 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


The world’s new, prodigious object lessons are 
not lost on wise young Japan. With the sagacious 
eyes of the East she has watched four imperial 
militarist thrones crash to the earth and break into 
fragments—the thrones of the German, Austrian, 
Turkish, and Russian Empires. She sees the whole 
planet completely encircled by a ring of republics 
—France, Germany, Russia, China, the United 
States of America. She watches the sole remaining 
great western empire—Britain—a commonwealth 
of free nations under a liberal monarchy granting 
increasing liberty and responsibility to its subject 
peoples. As a result, her best younger leadership 
desires not to stand defiantly in antagonism to the 
West, but in confident dignity to share in its coun- 
cils and policies. 

China is, of course, politically, simply broken 
china. Those swashbuckling, swaggering tuchuns, 
each like a medizeval Rhine baron, picturesque but 
brutal, rule the provinces of China with a rough 
high hand. They crush every drop of taxation from 
the people and then fling them aside like a squeezed 
orange. The writs of the Government at Peking 
do not run far beyond the walls of their yamen. 

China will, however, be one again. Her history 
makes it certain. Look at the Chinese people, one 
race living in one unbroken land watered by two 
immense rivers. When the British were woad- 
painted, skin-clad, wolf-hunting tribes, China was 
one people under one government, with an already 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 39 


old culture. With one outlook of mind and habit 
of life, with, roughly, one religious outlook, one 
general civilization, the house of China can never 
be “ divided against itself ” for long. The root peril 
of China in the new world was that her eyes were 
on the past and not the present, not to speak of the 
future. She is now broken by the shock of the 
sudden crash of new ideas. After staying still for 
a thousand years, she leaped from an ancient autoc- 
racy to a modern republic in a month. But when 
you look in the faces of her men and women and see 
the sturdy practical common sense, the endurance, 
the industry, you are sure with complete certainty 
that China will again become one and strong. 
When she does so, she will become, by the size of her 
territory, the immensity of her population, her in- 
exhaustible mineral resources, and the deep, quiet 
wisdom of her ancient culture, one of the mightiest 
forces in the world. 

Will she be a force for war or peace, for world- 
race conflict or world comradeship? It was just 
these indescribably wonderful possibilities that lie 
before China that made that great social reformer, 
Dr. Barnett, after a lifetime spent in the slums of 
East London, startle his friends, as he lay brooding 
over the world in his last hours, by repeating again 
and again as his final conviction—not some new 
truth about the slums—but this: “ The future his- 
tory of the world depends more than anything else 
upon this: how Christianity is presented to China.” 


40 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


III 


That is the wonder world of new Asia which 
we see aS we gaze down upon it from our eyrie in 
the moon. A startling contrast, however, meets us 
directly we turn our glass on to the lands of the 
white man. 

Starting from China, we discover first, not a true 
white man’s land, but the Philippines, governed 
by the United States. It is an archipelago about 
the size of Great Britain, said to be the richest in 
resources in the world. It has a population of 
ten millions and could nourish eighty millions. 

We move our view now to the south, to a sub-con- 
tinent—Australia—on whose surface of three mil- 
lion square miles only five and a half million in- 
habitants are found, a population less than that of 
Greater London. Of these five and a half million 
inhabitants more than half live in six capital cities. 
Apart from her great deserts Australia reveals wide 
areas of pasture and arable land sparsely populated 
by white people and here and there punctuated 
by beautiful cities. Japan is one twentieth of the 
size of Australia and has ten times its population. 
In spite of its desert areas, Australia could cer- 
tainly easily support twenty to twenty-five times its 
present population. 

In New Zealand we find again an area inhabited 
for the most part by white people with a sprinkling 
of the aboriginal Maoris and with a population of 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 41 


not much more than a million in a region almost 
comparable in size, climate, and resources with the 
British Isles. 

We now move our telescope rapidly to the north- 
east, over the six thousand five hundred miles that 
separate Wellington and New Zealand from Van- 
couver and Canada. We find ourselves looking 
at British Columbia on the Pacific seafront of 
Canada. British Columbia alone has a fretted sea- 
board longer than that of the United States, and its 
area is over 390,000 square miles. With fertile 
territory equal to France and Spain combined, the 
population of British Columbia is little more than 
that of the city of Birmingham in England. Yet 
the forces of her salmon-teeming rivers could, if 
harnessed, equip a continent with electric light and 
power. She has over 180 million acres of forest and 
woodland. Her fisheries, along her fiord coast, are 
said to eclipse in capacity those of the whole At- 
lantic. In one only of her wonderful coal fields she 
can yield 10,000,000 tons a year for a thousand 
years. In her virgin forests and prairies there is 
enough fertile soil for harvests of grain and fruit 
to feed a thousand times her present population. 

The whole Dominion of Canada—which in size 
almost exactly equals Europe—has a population of 
only eight millions—much less than, for instance, 
little Korea or the Shantung peninsula of China, 
either of which could be placed in one of Canada’s 
lakes as an island. 


42 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


California is, in comparison with either Japan, 
China, or India, another center of a relatively 
sparsely populated area. The population of the 
United States, though more than a dozen times as 
great as that of Canada, is, indeed, as compared 
with that of China as a town to a great city; for 
the United States with three million square miles 
of territory has 105,000,000 inhabitants, whereas 
China with half the land—1,500,000 square miles 
—probably has well over 400,000,000 inhabitants. 

Running southward swiftly from Mexico past 
Panama to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, we 
discover in Central and South America a conti- 
nent with a climate ranging from the more than 
tropical luxuriance of the Amazon down to the 
biting wintry storm-harassed rocks of Cape 
Horn. 

It is a country whose splendid river systems,— 
irrigating vast territories of fertile soil,—inex- 
haustible mineral resources, and magnificent natu- 
ral harbors have so far (if we survey the continent 
as a whole) lain largely undeveloped. No one can 
look at those wonderful South American lands, 
and most of all the great temperate regions in the 
Argentine, Chile and Uruguay, and contemplate 
what has already been done in creating the cities 
of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, 
without realizing that here is a continent that will 
inevitably draw the ambitious eyes of both the West 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 43 


and the East. Its existing population of American 
Indians (the semi-enslaved degenerate descendants 
of a sturdy race) and the mixed race—Spanish and 
Portuguese blended with Indian and Negro—are 
clearly inadequate to the tremendous task of devel- 
oping the possibilities of South America. 

Looking afresh, then, at the scene as a whole, 
and trying to envisage it from the elevated and 
detached position of a scientist in the moon, we see 
a broad fluttering tide of human beings in Asia 
pressed by the urgent drive of their own incredible 
multitude eastward and southward toward the 
other shores of the Pacific—the relatively sparsely 
populated lands of the Americas and the open 
spaces of Australasia. 


IV 


We have here, then,—in a congested Asia alive 
with new ambitions and powers, and in an America 
and Australasia semi-populated with white folk 
belonging to an alien civilization,—the raw material 
of a catastrophic race migration of unexampled 
magnitude and menace to the peace of the world. 

We see, on one side, Japan, China, and India in 
the situation of countries that must—and in fact 
do—automatically overflow their boundaries. We 
see, on the other side, the white man’s lands half 
empty. What can stop the swamping of the minor: 


44 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


ity of whites by the tidal waves of Asia’s millions? 

Already these races have spilled over the brim in- 
to the areas round about. In Hawaii half-way 
across the Pacific there are now as many Japanese 
as there are Hawaiians. Japan has made the Mar- 
shall and Caroline Islands almost Asiatic and her 
population is spreading into the American Philip- 
pine Islands. 

The Chinese unless held back would automati- 
cally submerge the original races of islands like the 
Samoa group. They have poured their virile per- 
sistent population into all the lands from Singapore 
through Java down the Malay Archipelago. In 
Singapore you may see the Chinese merchant in his 
Rolls-Royce, the Chinese shopkeeper in his Ford, 
and the Chinese coolie pushing his creaking wheel- 
barrow. They may not politically govern the land, 
but they come very near to possessing it. In the 
Fiji Islands, where the white planter has created 
a demand for cheap, abundant labor, 40 per cent of 
the population is Indian. 

These are relatively tiny symptoms of the vaster 
movement; for Japan and China look farther across 
the seas, and their enormous overflowing popula- 
tions confront an Australia and a New Zealand, a 
South America, a United States, and a Canada, 
largely unpopulated in comparison with their own 
dense masses of humanity. 

Left to the untrammeled influence of purely 
natural forces such as have operated in race mi- 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 45 


grations* throughout history there would—now 
that the oceans have been almost annihilated by 
steamships—be a great race migration from Asia 
on to all the surrounding continents.’ 

California and British Columbia already have 
their Asiatic populations, and no shipyard can be 
found in Peru or Chile without its Japanese arti- 
sans hammering, sawing, planing, and screwing. 

But Australia in 1900 bolted and barred the door 
against Asiatic labor immigration. This was an 
expression not only of general political policy, but 
of the certainty felt by white labor that the cheaper 
Japanese and Chinese workmen, living on a little 
rice and having no luxuries, would swiftly undercut 
and eliminate the white artisan by the sheer pres- 
sure of economic law. British Columbia, realizing 
the immense attractiveness of her vacant spaces of 
fertile territory, resists the flood tide of Asiatic 
immigration with legislative lock gates; the same 
is true of the United States. Most of this legisla- 
tion is based rather on economic and social tests 
than on race discrimination, but aims at race pro- 
tection. In a word, the white countries have issued 
their decree—‘ Thus far and no farther.” 

But suppose this question of immigration could 
be brought before a great tribunal of the nations. 


1H.g., the race migrations that carried the Angles and Saxons 
into Britain; the Goths and Vandals into Rome; and Europeans 
into America. 

2 Africa is one of these continents to which Asia has been mi- 
grating; but it will be dealt with, in this book, separately and 
later. 


46 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


The Asiatic would put his case thus: 

“ We fought with you through the war. A mil- 
lion Indians enlisted freely without conscription 
during the period of the war, and fought and died 
in France and Flanders, in Salonica and on Gal- 
lipoli, in Mesopotamia, on the hills of Palestine, 
and in nearly every quarter of Africa. 

“Scores of thousands of Chinese came across 
the world. They hewed wood, drew water, broke 
stones, drained marshes, laid roads, and built rail- 
ways for the Allied forces on the Western front. 
Japan with her navy, and in some small degree with 
her land forces, took part from the beginning in the 
great contest. 

“You can use us when you want us to lay down 
our lives to defend you. We can enter your terri- 
tories then. You even draw us in, as you have 
done in Fiji and Africa, when you want cheap 
labor. But you try to exclude us from political life 
and from holding land in your territory, in your 
cities, and on your farms. We cannot be content to 
be your tool for ever. ‘ Self-determination’ is our 
motto as it is yours. You penetrate our shores; 
why should we not penetrate yours? If you ex- 
clude us from yours, we will exclude you from ours. 
You say yours is the higher civilization; has that 
been demonstrated? ” 

Where the races have actually mingled, as in 
Fiji, the ferment boils up into not only strikes, but 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 47 


conflict. In Fiji, for instance, in February 1920 the 
sixty thousand Indians demanded equal rights 
with the whites and declared themselves to be as 
good as they. And the disturbance was only at last 
put down by sheer military force. 

On the other side, however, there is an implacable 
resistance. The United States’ “ California Ques- 
tion ” has been a bone of contention for decades. 
Out of this debate on the admission of Asiatics to 
California arose President Roosevelt’s ‘“ Gentle- 
men’s Agreement ” when in 1907 Japan consented 
to stop the emigration of laborers to the United 
States. The situation has subsequently been embit- 
tered, however; first, by the fact that the California 
and other Western state legislatures have passed 
laws which have exasperated Japanese feeling; 
secondly, by the passage in 1924 by the Senate of 
legislation that discriminates racially against the 
Japanese ; and thirdly, by a decision of the Supreme 
Court that Indians are ineligible as Indians to be- 
come citizens of the United States. The “ Cali- 
fornian point of view ” has been ably crystallized 
by Mr. Galen Fisher. He says: ? 


It might be thus outlined: The Japanese are un- 
assimilable because they are radically different in 


1Case of Bhagat Singh Thind, reversing decision of an Oregon 
eourt, February, 1923. Congressional Digest 2: 266-8, June, 1923. 
Literary Digest 76: 13, March 10, 1923. 

2 Creative Forces in Japan, pages 60-61. 


48 THH CLASH OF COLOR 


physique, in customs, religion, and political habits. 
They do not treat women as we do, but make them 
work in the fields like men. They own allegiance 
to a “second Prussia,” and even the Japanese born 
in America would fight against their adopted coun- 
try in case of war. They are clannish and form 
“eolonies.” They do not often undercut white 
workmen, but they work longer hours and are so 
efficient that the average white man cannot com- 
pete. They are likely to break a contract if it goes 
against them. They are so thrifty and multiply so 
rapidly that in a few decades they will own a large 
part of the State. The South has one race problem; 
we don’t want another. 


The contrary view does not at all stand for unre- 
stricted immigration, but for a high standard of 
restriction based on cultural and economic grounds 
and not on racial discrimination. 

To have before us in clear and sharply defined 
form a basis for discussing the whole issue, we 
quote as an example of the trend of thinking on 
this subject by Christian bodies the resolution 
adopted in May, 1924, by the General Conference 
of the Methodist Episcopal Church at Springfield, 
Massachusetts: 


Whereas, the problems that grow out of race are 
the most acute and potentially the most dangerous 
of existing world problems; 

And whereas, Jesus Christ our Master stands for 
the oneness of our humanity and the equal worth 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 49 


of every human soul, regardless of race, birth, or 
color; 

And whereas, Christianity in its beginning pre- 
sented to the world “ the blinding vision of one race, 
one color, and one soul in humanity,” and had this 
vision and call been followed in its entirety and 
high challenge we would have today a world of 
brotherhood instead of a world divided into suspi- 
cious and warring racial groups; 

And whereas, the most outstanding obstacle to 
the coming of the Kingdom of God among the na- 
tions of the earth are these national and racial 
arrogancies ; 

And whereas, the time has come for Christianity 
to assert its mind in no uncertain way and to bring 
to bear the pressure of its spirit in no feeble man- 
ner in the solution of this problem; 

And whereas, the democracy for which the United 
States of America stands and the Christianity 
which we profess, both alike demand a uniform and 
fair treatment for all peoples regardless of race; 

Therefore be it resolved: 

1. That we repudiate as un-Christian and untrue 
the idea that certain races are born to inherent and 
fixed superiority and rulership, while others are 
born to inherent and fixed inferiority and subor- 
dination. We stand for the life of open opportun- 
ity for all. 

2. That, while we note with gratitude their de- 
creasing frequency, we, nevertheless, record our 
deep sense of humiliation before God and man that 
the lynchings of Negroes, under whatsoever provo- 
cation, could take place within our land of democ- 
racy and in communities in which there are Chris- 
tian churches. 


50 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


3. That “ we deplore as unpatriotic and un-Chris- 
tian movements, policies, and programs in many 
sections that discriminate against and humiliate 
aliens, merely as aliens, or as aliens ineligible to 
naturalization, and that single out certain races 
and religious groups for discriminatory and un- 
friendly treatment.” We urge a Federal law rais- 
ing the standards for admission into the United 
States applying them to all peoples alike, and 
granting the privilege of citizenship to all persons 
thus admitted and lawfully residing in the United 
States who duly qualify, regardless of their race, 
color, or nationality. 


The same situation, debated in the British Im- 
perial Conference by the Prime Ministers of the 
British Commonwealth of Nations, has been faced 
on similar ground of economic and cultural rather 
than racial standards. The arguments have been 
thus put by the Prime Ministers of the areas in ques- 
tion. If we take them in the order that we have 
followed in this book, we listen first to Mr. Bruce, 
Prime Minister of Australia (1923). Speaking of 
the “White Australia” policy he said: 


It is not a policy founded on feelings of race or 
color, but it is motived by economic considerations 
which appear to us to be clear and cogent. 

Asiatic immigrants would be able to work and 
support life with what, to them, would represent a 
high degree of comfort, under conditions and for 
wages which would make it impossible for workers 
of European descent, accustomed to European 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 51 


standards, to compete with them. If, therefore, 
Asiatic immigrants were admitted, it would be 
impossible to provide employment for Europeans. 
They would inevitably be ousted from the labor 
market, and our population, and with it our insti- 
tutions and our civilization, would gradually lose 
their original European character, which we are 
naturally determined to do all in our power to 
‘preserve. It is for this reason that the Common- 
wealth Parliament has passed enactments which 
effectively prohibit the immigration of Indian or 
other Asiatic settlers or laborers. 


The Prime Minister of New Zealand (Mr. Mas- 
sey) has spoken in similar terms: 


If there is or ever has been any objection to 
Asiatics coming to New Zealand, these objections 
have been raised for economic reasons. ... The 
workers in New Zealand are naturally anxious to 
maintain the present standard of living, and if 
there happens to be a large influx of Asiatics at any 
time they have an idea that such standards might 
become lowered. . .. There is no such thing as 
race prejudice or anything of that sort. 


, Mr. Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Can- 
ada, has put the same point with even greater pre- 
cision. He said: 


So far as British Columbia is concerned, the prob- 
Jem is not a racial one: it is purely an economic 
problem. The Labor forces in British Columbia 
are very strong. ... What the Labor people are 


52 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


aiming at is to maintain certain industrial stand- 
ards which they have sacrificed much to acquire. 
As regards some of those who have come from other 
countries they are rather fearful, until at least 
they have resided for some time in Canada and have 
acquired our method of living, our customs, habits, 
and so forth, that to give them the rights of fran- 
chise in full may mean that the standard already 
maintained may be undermined. 


If we read the words of these three Prime Minis- 
ters carefully, they throw up for us in the most 
vivid way a startling idea. They declare with as- 
tonishing unanimity that really there is no race 
problem as a problem of race—+.e. of color, etc.—as 
such. Each one asserts explicitly that the problem 
is one of wage competition. That is to say, the con- 
flict is one in the sphere of economics. That seems 
to simplify the problem enormously. But does it 
really do so? For if we drive our question a stage 
further back and say, “ Why is there this wage 
competition?” the answer is immediate and clear 
—‘ Because the Asiatic standard of life is eco- 
nomically lower.” And if we ask, “ Why is the 
standard lower?” we get back to the customs, the 
religion, the idea of life, the whole make-up of the 
civilization of the people. 

What we see, in a word, is two differing stand- 
ards of civilization confronting each other across 
the Pacific Ocean. Neither desires to be destroyed. 
Each asks for expression. And the white man be- 


THE DILEMMA OF THE PACIFIC 53 


ing in the minority has a special fear that a tidal 
race migration may swamp him. 

We find ourselves therefore—as we look upon the 
shores of the Pacific Ocean—on the horns of a great 
dilemma. The Asiatic claims the right to migrate. 
That claim, standing alone, might be resisted; but 
behind the claim lies the vast heaped-up population 
like stupendous tidal waters pressing against a 
frail dyke. To allow free Asiatic immigration into 
the territories now covered by the whites around 
the Pacific, and to allow political representation 
in those territories, would submerge Western civil- 
ization. Yet to resist permanently the pressure and 
will for expansion of a thousand millions of people 
is a task that has never yet been attempted, and it 
is one which no sane man would willingly con- 
front, if an alternative course lay open to him. 

If to accept is impossible, to resist may be world 
suicide. 

What are we to do? 


CHAPTER III 
“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 


THE fascinated Roman pro-consul, when he de- 
clared that there was “ always something new out 
of Africa,” was thinking of the strange—indeed, 
almost incredible—animals that men captured and 
brought out of the unknown heart of Africa to 
startle even that blasé old Mediterranean world. 
Indeed, this perpetual African game of springing a 
new zoological surprise on the world was—as Aris: 
totle said—proverbial with the Greeks themselves. 

The Continent of Surprise, however, has given 
to this last generation the unique wonder of watch- 
ing the vastest, the strangest, and most mysterious 
of all Jands thrown open for the first time to the 
gaze and grasp of the world. 


I 


If we stand on a ridge of contemplation for a 
moment to get a true and steady perspective of his- 
tory, it seems incredible that Africa south of the 
Sahara should have remained for so many centuries 
almost unknown to the northern white world. 
There she hung, an immense pear-shaped pendant, 


at the feet of Europe, so near as to be visible across 
54 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 55 


the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. Of course, north 
of the Sahara her story was, in ancient and then 
in medieval times, linked closely up with that of 
Rome and Spain. Hannibal took Africans with 
him from Carthage through the Maritime Alps of 
Europe and across to conquer Rome. Rome (and 
Greece before her) colonized in North Africa and 
used the black soldiers to fight imperial battles. 
But south of the Sahara, though there was in the 
Sudan a vigorous civilization—half Negro, half 
Berber—for centuries till the Moors broke it up, 
Africa was to the outside world not a continent, 
but a broken coast line. 

The daring sea-explorers in their wooden craft— 
Prince Henry the Navigator, Roderick Diaz, Vasco 
da Gama and the rest—sailed feverishly along her 
“hot mysterious coasts” bringing back gold dust 
and black captives. The lure of Africa called them 
irresistibly on—her gold and ivory, her peoples for 
their slaves. England heard the call, and we find 
Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol crying in Henry V: 


A foutre for the world and worldlings base! 
I speak of Africa and golden joys. 


But they never penetrated her outer defences. The 
fever-charged stiletto of the mosquito held them 
at bay. Africa remained at heart the impenetrable 
Sphinx hiding her secret. 

The story of the hideous cruelty of the slave- 
trade opened. Prince Henry took slaves “in order 


56 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


that they might become Christians.” Britain, 
Portugal, Spain, and France joined in the lucrative, 
loathsome trade in human flesh. Behind the coast 
African chiefs raided the villages of other African 
chiefs for slaves in a hellish competition of bloody 
cruelty. 

Meanwhile, Columbus had discovered America. 
It developed its resources till, with the invention 
of the cotton-gin, ‘‘ cotton became king” in the 
Southern States. To supply the hunger for plenti- 
ful cheap labor in the cotton fields, shipload after 
shipload of shackled Negroes, sweltering in the 
foetid holds of slave ships, sailed from Africa to 
America. This merchandise of men and women, 
boys and girls, made the wealth of Liverpool and 
Bristol. In those ships—if men could only have 
seen it—there passed to America her tremendous 
and inescapable race problem of today—the Negro. 

Gradually, through two centuries the persistent 
voice of Christian pioneers in America and Europe 
and Britain after a long and bitter fight convinced 
many nations of the evil of the slave-trade and of 
slavery itself.’ 

Then came the movement that opened the new 
life of Africa. The sea-explorers of the coast were 
followed by the land-explorers: Mungo Park, Clap- 
perton, Burton, Speke, Baker, Barth (the German), 
Grant, and others who broke into North and 


1 See Sir Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Trop- 
deal Africa (Chapters XVII and XVIII). 


EE 


“SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 57 


West Africa in the early and middle years of the 
nineteenth century. The opening of the Suez Canal 
in 1869 brought all East Africa much closer to 
Europe. The most wonderful penetration was, 
however, made from the south. David Livingstone 
sailed from Glasgow in 1840 to serve with Robert 
Moffat as a medical missionary in South Africa. 
He and his contemporaries opened up the marvels 
of the land of lakes and rivers, forests and moun- 
tains, inhabited by unnumbered tribes of Africans 
of many types. 

Who are the peoples first revealed to the gaze of 
the white world in the journeys of those dauntless 
explorers of the lands of Africa, from the Niger and 
the Nile to the Congo and the Zambezi and Orange 
rivers? We tend tosay “ Negro ” for all the peoples 
living in Africa. It would be just as sensible to 
say “‘ German ” for all the separate and very differ- 
ent Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and Slav races 
living in Europe. In Africa there is no pure race 
anywhere. Here is a vast continent three times 
the size of Europe. In it at least six great races * 

1 These races are—running from North to South—as follows: 
the Semite (the Arab and Negroid Arab who has influenced 
Africa for at least 2000 years) ; the Hamite, a tall, sinewy, broad- 
shouldered, reddish-brown, straight-nosed, thin-lipped trader and 
wanderer; the Negro, a burly, long-armed, short-legged, black, 
woolly-haired, broad- and flat-nosed man with projecting lips and 
jaws; the Bantu, a mixed race (probably a fusion of Hamites and 
Negroes)—by far the greatest of the African peoples; the Bush- 
man, &® Merry, very primitive, music-loving soul, about five feet 
high, slim, sinewy, with broad forehead, flat nose, and wide mouth 


and rusty woolly tufty hair; and the Hottentot, the real South 
African (with a Bushman strain and probably some Hamitic blood 


58 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


are so mingled that, though all are distinct in parts, 
each is blended with the others in other parts. 

Livingstone revealed, however, the tragedy of 
these African peoples bleeding to death. ‘“ Blood, 
blood, everywhere,” he cried. It seems certain that 
slave raiding in Livingstone’s day cost Africa two 
million lives a year, a ghastly trail of burnt villages 
littered with skeletons and of wildernesses that had 
been gardens. The horrible slaughter of the slave 
traffic was the peak of the already existing moun- 
tainous cruelty of the fetish sacrifices of human 
blood, with the raiding of tribes for young folk for 
the sacrifices, the poison, and other hideous ordeals 
of the witch-doctor, the intertribal fighting and 
head-hunting. Behind the witchery of her splendid 
forests and rivers have always lurked these inde- 
scribable horrors of the African scene. 

Simultaneously Livingstone and the others 
caught glimpses of the astonishing resources of 
Africa. Britain and Europe had bred enormous 
populations.» More mouths opened hungrily than 
they could easily feed. So the white races needed 
raw material for foods and fabrics. Africa’s teem- 
ing soil and her mines of precious metals and jewels 
promised lavish supplies. 

So the “scramble for Africa” began. Its most 


in him)—some five feet six inches tall, ranging in color from 
tawny to dark brown, woolly-haired, with broad flat nose and 
Negro lips. See Race Problems in the New Africa, by W. C. 
Willoughby (Oxford University Press, N. Y., 1923), the most 
authoritative book on this subject. 

1 See Chap. I. 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 59 


hectic years were from 1890 to 1900. In France, 
Belgium, and Germany the governments led the 
way. In Britain the government held back till 
public opinion forced the pace. The British trad- 
ing companies (the Royal Niger Company, the East 
African Company, and the Chartered Company in 
the South) and the increasing slave scandal of the 
Arabs made occupation inevitable. Is there a more 
eloquent series of treaty titles in the story of 
diplomacy than the Anglo-German Agreement 
(1890) defining their “spheres of influence”; the 
Anglo-French Declaration (1890) recognizing 
France’s predominance in the Sahara and rule over 
Madagascar; the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty (1891) 
giving Portugal its possessions east and west; the 
Franco-German Convention (1894); the Anglo- 
Italian Protocols (1891); the Anglo-French Con- 
vention (1898) ; and the troubled catalogue of con- 
ventions that punctuate the history of the Congo 
Free State and Belgium? 

The Great War carried the process a step further. 
Germany was struck off the map of Africa; and her 
territories were put under the trusteeship of 
France, Belgium, Britain, and the Union of South 
Africa, as stewards responsible to the League of 
Nations. So from the Cape to the Sahara and from 
the Niger and Congo to Zanzibar all tropical Africa 
was divided among the European powers.* 


1 For details see Sir Charles Lucas, The Partition and Coloniza- 
tion of Africa; Sir Harry Johnston, The Opening Up of Africa; 
Sir Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. 


60 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


It was a strange bewildering process, in which 
were blended the spiritual adventure of a David 
Livingstone; the empire-building commercial archi- 
tecture of a Cecil Rhodes; the bloody and filthy 
cruelty, born of the lust of wealth, in the Congo, 
under the régime of Leopold of Belgium. 


i 


Black Africa has become a dependency of white 
Europe; but the tie is now far closer than one of 
political rule. 

The one thing that is impossible now and for 
evermore is for the white and the African peoples 
to separate their lives. Africa will more and more 
be a central part of the life of the white peoples. 
Especially is this true of the British people; for, 
from the Upper Nile to the Cape of Good Hope, 
one unbroken British rule runs over some thirty- 
five millions of Africans of all races, through the 
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tangan- 
yika Territory, Nyassaland, Rhodesia, Bechuana- 
land, South-west Africa, and the Union of South 
Africa. Britain’s African territory, when we have 
brought in British Somaliland, Nigeria, the Gold 
Coast, Gambia, and Sierra Leone,’ is larger than 
Europe. 

Railways pour the rubber and the cotton, the 


1See map, p. 14 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 61 


cocoa and the ivory, from the hinterland to the 
wharves, where tramp ships lie with empty hulls 
waiting to be filled for America and Europe. To- 
day convoys of motor trucks and freight trains 
thunder down from the interior bearing a hundred 
tons, where twenty years ago a score of men walked 
single file each carrying a hundred pounds. 

At the morning bath we use soaps made with 
African nut-oils. Our shirt may be of cotton grown 
by brown hands in Egypt or in the cotton belt of 
Africa or in America. It is from the soil of Africa 
and from the laboring hands of Africans that we 
take the coffee on the breakfast table. We owe to 
the African an inexhaustible catalogue of neces- 
sities: the African oak and leather of our chairs; 
the rubber of the golf ball, or the tennis ball, of 
the heels of our shoes or the tires of our automo- 
biles. The timber of many school desks and office 
furnishings comes to us by African labor. The 
gold that is the basis of the currency that we 
use is mined by Kafirs—for a seventh of the 
world’s whole store of gold comes from Africa. 
Black hands give to us the ivory of the knife-handle 
or the billiard ball; the cup of cocoa and box of 
chocolates—for West Africa is the greatest cocoa- 
producing area in the world; the spices in our 
foods; much of the sugar and the sweetmeats. 
From Africa comes the oil-cake, with which our 
cattle are fed and our milk thus produced in the 
winter; the margarine, which has replaced butter 


62 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


for many millions of members of the white races; 
and even the raw material of the propellant ex- 
plosive which flung the shells that blasted Vimy 
Ridge. 


iif 


The Labor Problem.—The labor of producing 
these raw materials for the white world is revolu- 
tionizing the African. The horn of the motor truck, 
and whistle of the railway engine, the buzz of the 
steam saw, the rattle of the crushing mills, sound 
where his fathers only heard the roar of the lion 
and the chatter of parrots and monkeys. There 
have been more drastic changes in the life of the 
African peoples during the fifty years between the 
death of Livingstone and the death of Khama, 
than from the days when King Solomon sent his 
slaves to mine gold in Ophir to the coming of Livy- 
ingstone. This labor works under two systems. 

First,—and this prevails in British West Africa 
most of all,—the native cultivates and gathers the 
cocoa, rubber, or oil, and sells it to the white mer- 
chant for export, buying in return the manufac- 
tured fabrics and hardware and other goods from 
the white man. When we come to grapple with the 
problem of the African’s capacity to work and to 
progress, this fact is of great importance. For as 
Sir Hugh Clifford, Governor of Nigeria, says: 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 63 


Cocoa cultivation is in the Gold Coast and in 
Ashanti a purely native industry; there is hardly 
an acre of European-owned cocoa-garden in the 
territories under the administration of this Govern- 
ment—this remarkable achievement of a unique 
position as a producer of one of the world’s great 
staples assumes in my opinion a special value and 
significance.* 


The second method of securing products is that 
of white capital employing wage-earning African 
laborers. Here we see the white planter in Kenya 
or elsewhere in solar topee, shirt, and shorts, direct- 
ing the Africans’ work; and the white manager of 
mines ruling the work of Africans recruited by the 
hundred thousand from tribal villages far away. 

This African labor is worked either by free con- 
tract with the individual laborer, as on the Gold 
Reef or in Kenya Colony; or by forced labor, as 
in the pestilential slavery systems of Portuguese 
West Africa. 

To allow forced labor to prevail would simply 
mean that the old way of slave trading by deport- 
ing Negroes to other lands would be replaced by the 
new way of working the Negroes as slaves in their 


1 In the seven years preceding the war the Africans of the Brit- 
ish West Coast by native production from small holdings multi- 
plied their produce by seven times, from £336,000 in 1906 to 
£2,489,000 in 1913; but the natives in the German Kameruns 
under a system of white exploitation, on highly organized plan- 
tations in an area twice the size of the Gold Coast, only increased 
from £48,000 in 1906 to £150,000 in 1913, or a multiple of only 
three. 


64 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


own country. In a word, Africa would become the 
stupendous slave-farm of the white races, which 
would ruin the white, as it debased the Roman 
Empire to its final decay and death. It is now 
definitely and decisively ruled, at least under the 
British government in Africa, that no forced labor 
can be demanded in any territory for private enter- 
prise, and only for public purposes (e.g., road-mak- 
ing or transport) under emergency conditions and 
on consultation in each case with the Colonial Office 
in London. To that course the whole world must 
surely come in the end. 

In the realm of free labor by contract with the 
individual we find the outstanding example in the 
mines of South Africa. There a quarter of a mil- 
lion Africans work in the gold and diamond mines 
of Rhodesia for $12.50 to $17.50 a month and every- 
thing found, normally on a six months’ contract, 
which enables the African to go back to his home to 
gather in the harvest. The system is of course far 
from perfect, and the prevalence of miners’ phthisis 
is only one of numerous ills still waiting solution. 

To carry our highly artificial Western industrial 
system, with its method of handling men imperson- 
ally in masses, into the fragile, personal, primitive 
tribal system of Africa inevitably creates serious 
evils. It smashes the chief’s personal authority. 
It corrodes the simple animistic faith in spirits. 
And it puts nothing stable and good in their place. 

The Land Problem.—The method, however, of 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 65 


dealing with the African that creates the greatest 
unrest and rebellious feeling is not that of forced 
labor; it is the method of thrusting him off from 
his ancestral lands, or refusing to give him a clear, 
secure title to the lands that he has. 

The Bantu African has two loves that weave 
themselves into his songs and his talk and all his 
thought—they are the love for his land and his 
cattle. He will sing about these as the Persian 
poet sings of princesses or a Herrick sings of his 
lady love. Yet today in Rhodesia the native has 
been thrown off most of his land, and therefore 
divorced also from his cattle. In other parts of 
Africa—as in Kenya Colony for instance—he sees 
himself since the war thrust from his highlands by 
the white settler. 

“When I enlisted in the war,” he says, “ you 
made great promises to me. The war has long been 
over and the Allies won it; but I find new taxes on 
my huts, new and higher prices to pay for my goods, 
a new invasion of white settlers on my lands, and 
Indians competing with me in my trades. I have 
had no other reward.” 

Here—as everywhere—it is fear and insecurity 
and a sense of injustice that are the parents of 
unrest and race hatred. 

It is often retorted that to leave the Negro on his 
land is to condemn Africa to perpetual backward- 
ness and infertility through his laziness and his 
lack of organizing capacity. The figures given 


66 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


above about cocoa produce on the Gold Coast 
sharply challenge this view. 

Sir Frederick Lugard, ex-Governor of Nigeria, 
Says: 


It has long been the fashion to speak of the 
African as naturally lazy, leaving work to his 
women, and contented to lie in the sun and eat and 
drink. It would seem, however, that there are few 
races which are more naturally industrious. ... 
The labor expended in collecting and preparing for 
export some £4,000,000 worth of palm produce in 
the Southern Provinces of Nigeria, and of £1,500,- 
000 worth of ground nuts for the Northern Proy- 
inces, must be prodigious. . . . No white man could 
ever carry so heavy a load or for so long a distance 
as he does without over-fatigue, and at heavy earth- 
work with his own implements he can show good 
results. At skilled trades he is an apt pupil. In 
West Africa natives trained as apprentices man 
the work-shops and the printing-offices, and make 
efficient turners, fitters, smiths and ships’ carpen- 
ters, and even engineers of launches.* 


The whole issue has been crystallized in sentences 
that carry conviction by Captain Orr in his The 
Making of Nigeria. He says: “ The whole question 
of industry and idleness depends almost entirely on 
incentive. When the African native is given an 
incentive to work, he will work in a way that is 
sometimes almost astounding.” 

Booker Washington put the matter in a nutshell 


1The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 67 


when he said, “ There is all the difference in the 
world between working and being worked.” 

The legend of the African’s superlative laziness 
is similar to the views about his savagery, sensual- 
ity, and superstitious stupidity. They rest, first, 
on a partial and lopsided view of his history, of 
what is going on inside his brain now, of his present 
attainments and of his capacity for progress. Not 
only so. It is literally true to say, “ The Negro 
cannot do this, that, or the other,” while his mind 
is swaddled and bound in the fears that dog him 
through life—the perpetual dread of witchcraft 
sorcery, and demons.* It is, however, equally true 
and necessary to say that when the African has 
escaped those dreads and has received the one thing 
that “ drives out fear ”—a real Christian education 
—his sheer mental capacity and his powers of 
organizing leap forward. This has been shown for 
instance through Tuskegee, Hampton, and other 
American colleges. Lord Bryce said that the 
American Negro had developed more in sixty years 
than the Anglo-Saxons did in six centuries. Begin- 
nings have also been made on similar lines in Africa, 
in Lovedale, Tigerkloof, and other great Christian 
public schools and colleges. 

Out of the shock and jostling of the new contacts 
in the world of labor an intense antagonism between 
the white races and the African peoples is flaming 


1It has now been finally proved by the newer psychology that 
fears (phobia) working in the subconsciousness paralyze and 
stunt the powers of the mind. 


68 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


up in some parts of Africa. Yet in other parts of 
Africa we discover little or no race hatred. 

What is the cause of the anger in the one place 
and the friendliness in the other? 

The race hatred of South Africa and Rhodesia 
is due to three things mainly: the loss of land, the 
refusal of a share in government, and the refusal 
by white labor of the African’s right to do skilled 
work. By law there is no color bar; in practice 
white labor insists on the color bar.* 

It is their sense of injustice in regard to stand- 
ards of labor and wages, land-holding and the vote, 
that has brought about the growth in the black 
peoples—for the first time in all their history—of 
a sense of their own oneness as a race. Divided by 
even thousands of miles of land,—and in the case 
of the American Negro by three thousand miles of 
water,—they have never had a consciousness of 
common racial life till today. But now they have 
it. In remote arteries of the Negro world, through 
the African and the American Negroes’ life the 
pulse of race consciousness tingles. 

1A recent judgment (1923) of the Supreme Court of the 
Transvaal has declared that the restriction of skilled labor to 
white men by the “Color Bar” regulation of the Mines Works 
and Machinery Act of 1911 is a breach of the constitution. This 
ruling has struck a blow at the heart of the old position by prov- 


ing its illegality. But practical application of the ruling will 
be slow and steadily resisted. 


* SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 69 


IV 


The gathering together of a “ Pan-African Con- 
gress” at Paris under the presidency of M. Diagne 
—a native African, and Deputy for Senegal—dur- 
ing the Versailles Conference of 1920, to formulate 
a policy for the relations of the Negro and white 
races, is a symptom of this growing African unity. 
The Congress was not really fully representative 
in the sense that its title would suggest. But it 
was able to express the general demand of the 
awakened Negro, the gist of which is the desire for 
(1) an international code of laws for the protection 
of natives and (2) a permanent secretariat in the 
League of Nations to see to the application of these 
laws. 

In America causes similar to those operating in 
Africa have been at work to create discontent and 
race feeling—social ostracism of the Negro, politi- 
cal disability, economic exclusion from high grades 
of work, a whole body of custom and law that sets 
up different standards for the Negro and for the 
white. 

If we ask “ What does the American Negro 
want? ” the answer is quite clear. First, education. 
Secondly, equal industrial opportunities; +7.e., 
“equal opportunity to work at just wages and 
under fair conditions. ”* Thirdly, a share in elect- 
ing their government. Fourthly, security from 


1The Trend of the Races, G. E. Haynes. 


70 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


mob violence and prejudiced legal decisions. 
Fifthly, and this lies at the root of things, they 
desire passionately to be freed from the perpetual 
ostracism and degradation that labels them as 
though they were members of another and a lower, 
almost a sub-human species. It is important to 
appreciate this issue from the Negro point of 
view. Let us look at an example. 

A full-blooded Negro friend of mine, who served 
in France with the American Negro troops during 
the war, received a telegram recently from two of 
his white friends asking if he could come over to 
them—some hundreds of miles across America 
—for a day’s conference. He came, traveling 
through the night, spent the day in counsel, and 
journeyed back again through the night to his lec- 
turing. My friend, who was a prince of high rank 
among the Fanti tribe, was educated in a Chris- 
tian school on the west coast of Africa. He is a 
doctor of philosophy of Columbia and a university 
lecturer, but—because of his color—he was obliged 
to travel both ways sitting up in a “Jim Crow” 
car, aS no sleeping-car berth on the railway was 
available for Negroes. He was a few months 
later in a South African city and had to cross the 
city hurriedly to give evidence at a committee of 
white men. He attempted to board a tramear, 
but was roughly pushed off as a Negro. He tells 
you, laughing, how the joke was against the 
whites, as he had to take a taxi at the expense of 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 71 


the white committee. Sailing later from Africa to 
England, he was told by the dining-room steward 
that he must not sit at any table with the white 
folk—some of whom on board were his close 
friends. The joke, he declares, was again against 
the white man, for he had a table and therefore a 
waiter to himself, instead of sharing him with 
eleven others! 

How many white men, however, would rise to 
his humorous acceptance of the segregation of 
one’s self as a member of a lower race, when in 
educational attainment, in princely birth, in sen- 
sitiveness of spirit, and in cultural habit he is 
superior to the majority of the people who thrust 
him aside? 

Would not most of us in such circumstances 
flame with a sense of injustice into burning resent- 
ment? Asa matter of fact, his own power to rise 
above these ignominies is purely spiritual—it rests 
on a sturdy and radiant Christianity. And as a 
result he uses all his educational influence, his 
quite extraordinary powers of racy, convincing 
oratory, and his wit and wisdom as a committee 
man—in fact his whole life—in the interests of 
cooperation and mutual understanding between 
the races.* 

When we have summed up all the desires of 

1In January, 1924, he became a leading advisory member of an 
important international Education Commission which went to 


Africa (East and Central) to go into the whole question of edu- 
cation in Africa. 


72 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


the American Negro,—education, economic justice, 
the ballot, security, freedom from ostracism,— 
they crystallize into one demand; i.e., for liberty 
and the opportunity for self-development, self- 
expression, and self-determination. In a word, 
they make common cause with every people in the 
world that is under white tutelage today in the 
cry for self-determination. 


Vv 


How, then, does the American Negro propose to 
attempt to achieve this aim? Broadly speaking, 
there are three great schools of thought advocat- 
ing widely divergent methods of campaign. One 
school, which has gained strength enormously 
since the war, is out for militant aggressive agita- 
tion—vehement, fiery propaganda that will even 
break out into the use of organized force if need 
be. 

This school is brilliantly led by the outstanding 
Negro writer and orator, W. E. B. DuBois, who, 
speaking after the war, thus sums up his vision 
of the fight of the ‘subject races”: “‘ Wild and 
awful as this shameful war was, it is nothing to 
compare with that fight for freedom which black 
and brown and yellow men must and will make 
unless their oppression and humiliation and insult 
at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark 
World is going to submit to its present treatment 


“SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” TS 


just as long as it must and not one moment 
longer.” * 

Yet DuBois is ready for cooperation in an edu- 
cational process if the white man will bona fide 
move toward the uplifting of Negro standards. 

Very different is the hoarse vibrant voice of 
Marcus Garvey, native of the West Indies, creator 
of the Negro Improvement Association and the 
African Communities League with The Negro 
World as its organ, floater of the non-effective 
“Black Star” liners, whose propaganda has 
nevertheless, by the mysterious “ wireless ” of the 
Negro peoples, reached even the remoter hinter- 
lands of Africa. 

Marcus Garvey is a tremendous demagogue. 
The following sentences, hurled at an immense 
audience of Negroes, are characteristic: 

“What is good for the white man is good for 
the Negro; namely, freedom, liberty, and democ- 
racy. We have no apology, no compromise to 
offer. If the English claim England, the French 
France, and the Italians Italy, as their native 
habitat, then the Negroes claim Africa, and will 
shed blood for their claim. We shall draw up a Bill 
of Rights for all Negro races, with a constitution 
to govern their destinies.” 

Then he clinched his argument with this dia- 
bolically inflammatory sentence: 

“ The bloodiest of all wars is yet to come, when 


1 For DuBois’ point of view see his Darkwater and The Negro. 


74 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


Europe will match its strength against Asia, and 
that will be the Negroes’ opportunity to draw the 
sword for Africa’s redemption.” 

Garvey with his purple robes of the “ President 
of the African Republic,” as he styles himself, and 
his noisy movement are on the Negro side what 
the Ku Klux Klan movement with its cowled 
night-riders is on the white side—a melodramatic, 
anarchic explosion of the more sulphurous vol- 
canic fumes of the race movement. Both rely on 
force instead of moral conviction; both are as de- 
testable morally as they are intellectually ridicu- 
lous. But they are real perils. As DuBois perti- 
nently says, had Garvey been a man of “ first-rate 
ability, canny, shrewd, patient, dogged, he might 
have brought a world war of races a generation 
nearer. He might have deprived civilization of a 
precious generation of respite where we have yet 
time to sit and consider-if differences of human 
color must necessarily mean blows and blood.” * 

Garvey was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury 
in New York and was given five years’ imprison- 
ment for using the American postal system to de- 
fraud investors in his Black Star Line enterprise. 

There is, however, the third great school of 
thought—that powerful strain in the new Negro 
movement which began in the great personality of 
Booker Washington, the head of Tuskegee Institu- 


1 Century Magazine, February 1923. The italics are ours. 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ”’ 75 


tion, and is carried on among many able men and 
women by his successor, Dr. Robert Moton. It is 
the principle of (a) pressing forward the educa- 
tion of the Negro in the faith that as he becomes 
more efficient he will win an ever increasing place 
in the life of his country and (b) cooperation with 
the white man by processes demanding infinite 
patience on both sides. It is a long, slow process, 
but it is the only one that builds on real rock. It 
is the Jine which Dr. Aggrey, the young Christian 
Negro professor whose experiences are related 
above,’ is both preaching and practising. 

It is being worked out in America now, not only 
in the splendid colleges like Hampton and Tus- 
kegee, but in an intensely interesting movement 
that is establishing in many centers influential, 
civic, interracial groups, whose members meet to- 
gether to thresh out their local as well as national 
race problems—and with remarkable success. 

Our judgment on this third movement will be 
decided by our attitude to education. If, as the 
writer believes, the outlook and the powers of a 
whole people can be transformed by a really 
adapted education, then the African can be 
equipped to stand shoulder to shoulder with the 
other races in a world cooperation. An education, 
we mean, that will equip him to be for the first 
time his best self. 


1See pp. 70-71. 


76 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


The education of the African has barely begun— 
education in handicraft and agriculture, homecraft 
and health,.in religion and in music, education for 
life. Yet it has already achieved miracles. The 
Christian schools for instance have made out of a 
tortured people, under a bloodthirsty tyranny that 
burned boys alive and chopped off their hands as 
they burned, a free, happy nation with its feet at 
least on the lower rungs of the ladder of real 
progress. The white governments in Africa have 
so far barely touched the education of the African. 
Indeed, over ninety per cent of all education there 
is given by missionary societies. Today, however, 
the British Colonial Office has taken the epoch- 
marking step of appointing a powerful educational 
committee to develop its African responsibilities, 
not separately from but in association with the 
missionary societies. 


VI 


So we see flung up in America and Africa the 
stark outline of the problem of black and white 
in those continents. We can solve it if we can 
give justice and equality of opportunity to the 
African and the American Negro. “ Equality” 
does not involve equal attainment nor even—im- 
mediately—equal political status, any more than 
the essential equality of boys in a school means 
no Senior privileges and no Freshman caps. 


“SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” [7 


* Brotherhood ” does not necessarily mean inter- 
marriage. 

Equality and brotherhood do mean, however, 
equal justice and the opportunity to develop and 
exercise all the faculties given to each man by God. 
They do not mean that all the men in a college get 
into the baseball team or make Phi Beta Kappa; 
but that all the men have an equal chance, and can 
develop and exercise every faculty of body, mind, 
and spirit; and that they all belong to the college 
and it to them. 

Applied to Africa this really means just what 
the League of Nations Covenant gathers up in 
Article XXII: that “the tutelage of nations not 
yet able to stand by themselves must be entrusted 
to advanced nations who are best able to under- 
take it,” and that “the well-being and develop- 
ment of peoples not yet able to stand by them- 
selves forms a sacred trust of civilization.” 

To work out those ideals on the actual soil of 
Africa in detailed administration is a long and 
difficult process. To that aim the British Com- 
monwealth of Nations, with its officials in Africa, 
is committed. The white nations governing in 
Africa are all in the League of Nations and have 
all signed the Covenant in Article XXII where 
those ideals are summed up. They are being 
worked out in many of the territories—though not 
at all in some and not completely anywhere. The 
permanent Mandates Commission overhauls the 


78 . THE CLASH OF COLOR 


reports on these territories every year, and the 
publicity—though often painful—is very whole- 
some. ' 

America also is, by the very constitution on 
which she has built her life, committed to the 
same ideal, which has perhaps never been more 
fitly expressed than by Sir Frederick Lugard, in a 
passage later quoted by President Harding in a 
speech in the Southern States, as seeming to him 
to indicate “the true way out.”* “ Here, then, is 
the true conception of the interrelation of color: 
complete uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in 
the paths of knowledge and culture, equal oppor- 
tunity for those who strive, equal admiration for 
those who achieve; in matters social and racial a 
separate path, each pursuing his own inherited 
traditions, preserving his own race purity and 
race pride; equality in things spiritual, agreed 
divergence in the physical and material.” 


Africa—the Sphinx continent—stands for the 
first time and probably the last time in history at 
the fork in the road of destiny. At that fork in 
the road stand guides. Some call her down the 
steep slope of race domination; others beckon her 
up the difficult hill of race cooperation. The de- 
cision is being made inevitably in this generation. 

To that decision everyone will contribute. 
America will play—as she is playing—a great 

1 Speech at Birmingham, Alabama, 26th October 1921. 


“ SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA ” 79 


part in it. Her fascinating, patient, and inven- 
tive experiments with interracial cooperation 
within her own boundaries, her large missionary 
enterprises in Africa itself, her educational enter- 
prises with their adaptation of curricula to the 
idea of training the Negro for life service in his 
community will exercise a powerful influence, both 
in themselves and as examples from which other 
peoples may learn much. In Europe, in Britain, 
and in Africa, the ordinary voting citizen, the 
shareholder in African companies, the government 
servant, the settler and planter, the trader, the 
missionary, the mining manager—all will share in 
deciding the issue. And on this issue rests the 
future not of the life of Africa only, but of all 
the white peoples with whom she and the Ameri- 
can Negro are now and forever interdependent 
parts. 

If and when that issue is worked out in terms of 
education and cooperation, we shall in a splendid 
way never before dreamed of see—as a gift to the 
whole world— something new out of Africa.” 


CHAPTER IV 
THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 


THe story of how a Western white race and the 
Indian peoples (320,000,000 in number) came to- 
gether is one of the most dramatic and fascinating 
in history.» But the conundrum “ How long is 
their association to continue? ”—this baffling yet 
inescapable riddle of race which confronts us to- 
day—is more entrancing; for its answer depends 
on a great dramatic movement in which we our- 
selves in this generation shall inevitably be deci- 
Sive actors. 


I 


If we could stand on the topmost peak of a 
Mount Everest of contemplation with the time 
machine in our hands and look back across the 
perspective of India’s story for some five thousand 
years, we should discover wave after wave of race 
invasion. The rich river plains of North India 
have always fascinated the hungry folk of the 
Afghan and Chinese highlands. 

Lured by the prosperous plains, a dark folk, the 


1See T. R. W. Lunt, The Quest of Nations, Chapter IV. 
80 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA) 81 


Dravidian race, came in prehistoric days trailing 
down the mountain passes of the Northwest Fron- 
tier. They drove the stone-age human packs into 
the remote hill valleys and jungle lairs where they 
still persist. 

Another stream began to flow from the north- 
east—narrow-eyed, yellow-skinned Mongols. Min- 
gling with the Dravidians of the delta lands of 
the Brahmaputra and the Ganges, they blended in 
the Bengali race. 

Bright, stalwart, paler-faced men then burst 
through the stark defiles of the great northwestern 
passes some three thousand five hundred years ago, 
a blithe, forceful, invincible race. These Aryans— 
or Indo-Europeans as we ought, perhaps, to call 
them—drove the Dravidian folk on to the Deccan 
plateau to become the industrious, non-fighting 
peoples of South India. 

The clamor of a new and startling cry echoing 
in the defiles of the Northwest Frontier in the 
year 1001 A.D. opened the most furious and gor- 
geous of all India’s race invasions. “ Allah 
Akbar!” the cry went up. “God is great!” 
the hills replied. Mahmud, the Afghan “ Idol 
Smasher,” with the green pennons of Islam fiut- 
tering, swept seventeen times in thirty years, 
scimitar in hand, through the red-rock passes and 
debouched on to the plains. 

These last invaders brought a hot-blooded new 
race and a fiercely intolerant new faith. The Mo- 


82 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


hammedan invasions changed the life of North 
India. Today from thousands of mosque minarets 
seventy millions of Moslems—nearly a quarter of 
India’s whole population—are called at every 
dawn with the battle-cry of their race brother- 
hood: 


There is no God but Allah, 
And Mohammed is the Apostle of Allah. 


The Aryans had already created Hinduism and 
the caste system. The newcomers now brought 
Islam and the Moslem brotherhood. They gave 
India its great permanent internal race conflict of 
Hindu versus Moslem—a clash of race and of cul- 
ture that is all the fiercer because it is also reli- 
gious. It runs deeper than any other division in 
India. 


II 


One day when Akbar the Great, Mogul Emperor 
of India,* ablaze with jewels and surrounded by 
turbanned courtiers, was seated on his throne, a 
white man came before him dressed in slashed 
raiment and ruffles, bearing a sword at his side 
and his plumed hat in his hand. 

He came to ask a favor. Neither of the men 

1 Akbar’s reign (1556-1605) was the greatest and wisest India 


ra known. He ruled the whole of India north of the Vindhya 
ills. 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 83 


knew that at that dramatic moment and in their 
persons there met the splendid climax of an old 
race civilization and the simple quiet beginnings 
of a new race invasion that was to eclipse all that 
had ever been. For the man was Sir John Mil- 
denhall, from the court of Queen Elizabeth of 
England, who had sailed round the Cape of Good 
Hope to India to ask for privileges for the East 
India Company, which was formed by London 
merchants to trade “at their own adventures ” in 
the East. 

The immortal names of warriors like Clive, ad- 
ministrators like Wellesley and Macaulay, teach- 
ers and authors like Duff and Carey, and rulers 
like the Lawrences, whose deeds are in all our his- 
tory books, call up the blended heroism and state. 
craft, spiritual genius, commercial vigor, callous: 
ness, sensitiveness and administrative “drive” by 
which Britain achieved a dominion in India which 
for the first time in all her history brought all her 
peoples under one rule. No one man dreamed it 
in its entirety; Britain certainly never realized 
what was happening. It was not planned; it 
grew. 

Precisely two centuries after Sir John Milden- 
hall stood before Akbar the Great, Governor- 
General Wellesley was convinced that nothing 
save complete British rule in all India could 
bring enduring peace. Sixty years later Queen 
Victoria not only became the first ruler who has 


84 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


ever governed all India,* but simultaneously an- 
nounced the policy of opening up to Indians places 
of power.in the administration of their own land. 

Is there any parallel to be found anywhere in 
history to the quiet audacity of that act? 

The British genuinely believed—and for the 
most part believe—that their rule was as much 
for the good of India as for Britain. They did 
not go to India for the good of India. They went 
to India for commerce. For commerce they needed 
peace and order. But they were really concerned 
to give India what she had never yet enjoyed— 
protection from invasion, internal peace, security 
for life and property, and the fruits of labor, 
under uniform law justly administered. It is not 
open to serious challenge that the military and 
civil service by which the British Raj has been 
exercised in India has—as a whole—been unex- 
celled for efficiency, disinterestedness, and hu- 
manity in the history of the government of any 
one race by another people. 

By a piquant irony—and with a sublime uncon- 
Sciousness—the British also produced among the 
Indian peoples almost everything that could be 
imagined to equip them to throw off the British 
Raj. Let us watch that astonishing process which 
is working at top speed today. 

The fundamental cause of the weakness of the 


1Da Gama landed in India 1498; Mildenhall 1599; Wellesley 
1798; Government of India transferred from the Company to the 
Crown 1858; Queen Victoria became Empress of India 1876. 


\ 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 85 


Indian peoples in face of race invasion has always 
been disunity. The bare idea of “an Indian na- 
tion ” was unthinkable in a sub-continent fifteen 
hundred miles wide by nineteen hundred miles 
Jong, in which live more than three hundred mil- 
lion people of differing races (more than the total 
population of Africa, North America, and Aus- 
tralia), talking a hundred and fifty languages, 
divided physically by hills and plateaus and 
deserts, broken socially into thousands of castes 
and sub-castes, and riven religiously by the an- 
tagonism of Moslem and Hindu.* 

The first necessity, then, for India if she was to 
stand alone was a real sense of unity. Britain at 
once began to create this by bringing into being a 
numerous young leadership in different parts of 
India all educated and, following Lord Macaulay’s 
famous minute, all speaking English; so that for 
the first time men from Calcutta and Peshawar, 
Delhi, Bombay, and Madras could meet and talk 
in one tongue. 

Even now, however, it makes us rub our eyes 
in incredulous amazement to see the books in 
which the British Government carried out that 
education. For they set, in the curricula of the 
schools and colleges, books that are the intoxicat- 
ing wine of fighting nationalism clamoring for 
freedom. Mill on Liberty; Milton’s Areopagitica 


1 Compare China with 400,000,000 people of one race, with no 
castes, talking dialects of one language, having one main faith, 
and divided by no great physical barriers. 


86 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


—that immortal flaming appeal for liberty of the 
press; Burke on the American Colonies and the 
French Revolution; and, most astounding of all, 
Cromwell as a _ special subject—Cromwell the 
most brilliant, remorseless, and successful fighter 
against the ruling executive in all British history! 
To add fuel to the fire, they educated thousands 
upon thousands of these boys and young men and 
then left them unemployed—with a sense of burn- 
ing injustice and nothing to do but talk sedition. 

It was a superb education if the British idea was 
to sting this Asiatic people into fighting the execu- 
tive authority of the British to the death. But 
they drop into the deepest morass of illogical 
stupidity if, having set such a curriculum of school 
and college study, they expect quiescence and are 
astounded and angered at the rise of an unquench- 
able flame of Indian nationalism. You might as 
well sow sunflowers and expect violets. 

The vast distances of India were another stum- 
bling-block in the path of unity. Lord Lawrence 
of Mutiny fame traveled day and night from 
Calcutta to Delhi in a fortnight. People were 
amazed at the extraordinary feat. Today, how- 
ever, any Indian can make the journey in a couple 
of days by railway for a few rupees. From Bom- 
bay to Calcutta is 1,349 miles—almost half the dis- 
tance from London to New York; but today an 
Indian high school graduate, for instance, can 
leave Bombay by the “ mail” on Saturday and be 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 87 


at work as a student in Calcutta University by 
Monday evening. 

Britain has built in India 37,000 miles of rail- 
way now carrying over 500,000,000 passengers 
each year. In those trains you will see all India 
jostling—a bewildering kaleidoscope of color and 
movement. Men of every conceivable caste, lan- 
guage, class and race—from a Prince Ranjitsinghi 
to an ash-smeared fakir, from a portly Parsee mil- 
lionaire to a Rabindranath Tagore, from the squat, 
quaint, friendly, fighting Gurkha and the burly, 
bearded Sikh to the languid intellectual Bengali. 
You meet agitators and officials, Brahmins and 
outcastes, policemen and professors. The rail- 
ways all day and every day are breaking down 
easte and making India more conscious of her 
unity. 

Driving on the great roads is itself a romance. 
The crowded highways are the very debating 
ground of the thronging Indian people. The 
Grand Trunk Road running fifteen hundred miles 
from Peshawar on the Afghan frontier to Calcutta 
on the Ganges delta has no Asiatic parallel in 
history. The little roads from country railway 
stations along which hundreds of motor buses 
carry their unfamiliar dust and smell, take news 
of all the world to plain and jungle villages that 
are a hundred miles from the railway. Those 
motor buses are—for the first time in Indian his- 
tory—stirring the whole pulse of village life in 


88 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


India. And in the last resort village life is India. 

How primitive is the life that they penetrate 
may be yauged from a story told to Mr. Deaville 
Walker by the motor-bus driver to whom it hap- 
pened. “The driver saw a large tiger standing 
defiantly in the road. The fearless beast took no 
notice whatever of the horn, and when the heavy 
motor bus rushed towards him at full speed, he 
sprang upon the hood, smashed the wind-screen 
to atoms with one stroke of his great paw, and 
then, losing hold, fell backwards and was crushed 
to death under the wheels. The terrified driver 
pulled up to collect his nerves! ” 

In the earlier days ideas traveled relatively 
slowly from pilgrim to merchant along the dusty, 
unmetaled tracks. But today a cobweb of tele- 
graph wires links India into one nervous system. 
A speech made in Congress at Delhi on one day is 
read and discussed on the next by Indians from 
the Afghan frontier to the canals of Travancore 
and the confines of Burma. More momentous 
still, the ocean cable, the wireless and the liner 
have taught India to “listen in” to the world’s 
talk and life. 

In the old days a decision by the British Gov- 
ernment reached a few dozen folk in India by sail- 
ing vessel in about three months. Today, how- 
ever, if the Secretary of State for the Colonies 
Says of the British Empire that, ‘“ There is only 


1India and Her People (1922). 


THH EXPANSION OF INDIA 89 


one ideal that the British Empire can set before 
itself, and that is that there should be no barrier 
of race, color, or creed which should prevent any 
man by merit from reaching any station if he is 
fitted for it,’* the next day sixty thousand stu- 
dents in India’s nine universities are discussing 
the words in their relation to India. In twenty- 
four hours it is in hundreds of Indian papers, in 
a dozen languages, with circulations running into 
millions. The man who can read tells the story 
to the multitudes who cannot; and in a week In- 
dians in every area of the sub-continent are agog. 

As though all those fermenting forces were not 
enough, Western and Eastern capital have com- 
bined to build up with Western machinery a 
swiftly growing industrial system in India. This 
is creating a new labor problem which is also a 
part of the race problem. 

When the newcomer to India stands, on arrival 
at Bombay, on the deck of a P. and O. liner, he 
sees behind the docks a forest, not of masts, no, 
or of minarets, but of factory chimneys with their 
grim foliage of smoke. There are in and around 
Bombay nearly thirty square miles of cotton 
mills and business warehouses with laborers’ 
dwellings, where 166,337 people live in one-roomed 
tenements averaging 4.47 persons to a room. 
Thirteen hundred miles away on the other side of 
India the river Hooghli has its jute mills and 


1 Mr. Winston Churchill, 1921. 


90 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


other factories lining the bank for miles. In 
Bengal there are coalfields producing over 10,000,- 
000 tons a year. Two to three hundred strikes a 
year are evidence of labor unrest and a ferment of 
new ideas: some extreme Bolshevik ideas brought 
in at the ports; others a vigorous and healthy re- 
bellion against disgraceful conditions that are a 
shame and a menace to the civilizations of which 
they are a part. The influence of the Interna- 
tional Labor Office of the League of Nations at 
Geneva—in whose councils India has a great place 
—is creating new Factory Acts and a higher con- 
science. 7 
Thus railways, roads, buses, cables, wireless, 
newspapers, factories, universities, and schools all 
combine to thrust into the stuff of Indian life 
everywhere the vehement working of a new leaven. 


IIT 


The war situation coming in on this India trans- 
formed the whole scene. Over a million Indians 
voluntarily enlisted, more than 600,000 for com- 
batant service, and over 400,000 for work behind 
the lines.* The total—including the standing 
army in India—reached to 1,300,000 men. They 
served and died on every one of the British fronts 
—European, Asiatic, and African. 


1See Reconstructing India, by Sir M. Visvesvaraya, K.C.1LE, 
lately Dewan of Mysore. (P. 8S. King, 1920.) 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 91 


The young educated non-combatant Indian con- 
ceived a contempt for the boasted white civiliza- 
tion that had, from an external point of view, re- 
vealed moral bankruptcy by flinging itself into 
civil war. The sacrificial heroic suffering, the 
“ grit,” the camaraderie of the war were hidden 
from him. Its horrors and bestialities were clear. 

The war ended; demobilization followed; and 
the men went back to India. The cry of “self- 
determination ” for Belgium and Serbia as the 
dominant war aim had been shouted by the West 
across India. The idea of self-determination or 
Swaraj had gathered way. 

The demobilized Indian soldiers did something 
new. ‘“ Illiterate village India is beyond the range 
of nationalist propaganda’”—men have always 
said. The end of the war was the end of that 
legend. The khaki-clad warrior strode back into 
his village the hero of incredible travels and feats. 
Nearly a million of them returned from the great 
white world to scores of thousands of villages. 
The villagers listened agape to their stories round 
the night fires—stories of London and Paris, Jeru- 
salem and Baghdad, Zanzibar and Tanganyika; 
the debates of the trenches, the whispers of Bol- 
shevik Russia; the murmurs of the world’s move- 
ments to govern itself. The impact was nation 
wide and revolutionary. It linked up village 
India with world movements and in particular 
with the wave of nationalistic self-determination. 


92 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


After the Armistice, hope was high. India had 
been promised reward for her war service. She 
had her own representative at the Peace Confer- 
ence at Versailles. She was represented on the 
League of Nations. Britain had said that she 
stood for the principle of self-determination as a 
basis of the Peace settlement. The great Indian 
scheme known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reform 
was passed in December 1919 by the British Par- 
liament. For the first time in all Indian history 
the principle of direct representative government 
was introduced.* 

At the close of 1920 India held her first General 
Election. The elected representatives came to- 
gether at Delhi to open the first Indian Assembly 
on February 9th, 1921. The Duke of Connaught 
—the only surviving son of Queen Victoria—in his 
inaugural speech after picturing the “ unforget- 
table splendor” of the Durbars held by his 
brother, King Edward the Seventh, and by his 
nephew, King George the Fifth, said that this 
Assembly lacked the color and romance of those 
brilliant concourses: 


But [he went on] it marks the awakening of a 
great nation to the power of its nationhood. In 
the annals of the world there is not, so far as I 
know, an exact parallel for the constitutional 


1 The election was to the Provincial Council and Assemblies and 
important parts of the administration were transferred to Indian 
hands, other parts being reserved to the British. 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 93 


change which this function initiates; there is cer- 
tainly no parallel for the method of that change. 
Political freedom has often been won by revolu- 
tion, by tumult, by civil war. . . . How rarely has 
it been the free gift of one people to another, in 
response to a growing wish for greater liberty, and 
to growing evidence of fitness for its enjoyment. 
Such however is the position in India today... . 
The principle of autocracy has been abandoned.* 


In the old fairy tales a malign witch comes to 
hiss a curse over the cradle of a new life. This 
happened at that time in India. In April 1919 
the shooting of Indians took place in the Jallian- 
wala Bagh at Amritsar in the Punjab. After 
days of rioting ten thousand Indians had gath- 
ered in a place where riot meetings had been pro- 
hibited. Argument on this event runs high, but 
the facts on which all agree are that, without 
warning to disperse, General Dyer opened fire 
with rifles till his ammunition was exhausted. 
Three hundred and eighty people were killed, and 
over a thousand were wounded and left unat- 
tended. A committee of investigation under Lord 
Hunter arraigned the action as “inhuman and 
un-British ”; the continuing to fire was condemned 
as “indefensible.” As the Duke of Connaught 
said, “The shadow of Amritsar has lengthened 
over the fair face of India.” 


1 Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy. Vol. Il. pp. 335- 
343. 


94 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


Simultaneously Moslem India was angered by 
the Allied peace terms proposed to Turkey. 

Beneath these political flames worked the 
subtler irritating influences on the home. Food 
was highly priced; famine was starving tens of 
thousands in wide areas; cholera and other epi- 
demics raged. Agitators laid the blame of all 
these things—bad harvests, high prices, disease, 
famine, drought, or flood—at the door of the 
British Raj. 

India, by this malign witchery, was smoldering 
with wrath just when this unique attempt at 
democratic government needed the most friendly 
atmosphere. The ‘“ Moderate” men—who have 
always included a very large section of the edu- 
cated—who were and are for giving the new re- 
form a fair chance were for the time overwhelmed 
by the tide. So there came the vastest and most 
violent upheaval of the human spirit that India 
has ever witnessed; far wider and deeper than the 
Mutiny of 1857. 

There came with the hour the man, Mahatma 
Gandhi, who was at once the voice and in part the 
creator of the Swaraj (Home Rule) Movement. 
He was the supreme prophet of Indian national- 
ism. But he flung away one of the greatest op- 
portunities in the world’s history. For he pro- 
claimed a policy of race separatism in an hour 
when the whole world is interdependent. 

How came a saint of so powerful a personality 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 95 


to plunge into a blunder so abysmal and tragic? 

Mr. M. K. Gandhi—a Hindu lawyer who had 
been educated in England and called to the Bar 
in London at the Inner Temple—had been for 
thirty years a supporter of the British Raj while 
pressing for Dominion Home Rule. As he himself 
says, his was “free voluntary cooperation based 
on the belief that the sum total of the activity 
of the British Government was for the benefit of 
India.” 

“I put my life in peril four times for the sake 
of the Empire: at the time of the Boer War when 
I was in charge of the Ambulance Corps whose 
work was mentioned in General Buller’s dis- 
patches; at the time of the Zulu revolt in Natal 
when I was in charge of a similar corps; at the 
time of the commencement of the late war when I 
raised an Ambulance Corps; and lastly, in an 
active recruiting campaign that brought on an 
attack of dysentery which proved almost fatal. 
I did all this in the full belief that acts such as 
mine must gain for my country an equal status in 
the Empire. So late as December, 1919, I pleaded 
hard for a trustful cooperation.” * 

He then explains that the “treachery” of the 
British Government in taking away the Turkish 
Khalif’s control of the Holy Places of Islam in 
Arabia and Syria, and “the Punjab atrocities” 


1 Letter to every Englishman in India (1920). Gandhi received 
the Boer War medal, the Zulu War medal and the Kaiser-i-Hind 
medal, but returned them all in 1919. 


96 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


(i.e., in particular the firing on the crowd at 
Amritsar under the orders of General Dyer) 
“have cempletely shattered my faith in the good 
intentions of the Government and the nation 
which is supporting it.” Gandhi called India to 
throw off British rule in its entirety. Fruitful 
political agitation was changed into a volcanic 
race rebellion. 

Gandhi’s non-cooperation program was a move- 
ment for race division. It had five planks. They 
all meant abstinence from race contacts with the 
British. They have all hopelessly collapsed. 

First, came the boycotting of British schools 
and colleges. There was a wave of enthusiasm 
for this, but now the schools are fuller than ever. 
His call for the renunciation of all British Gov- 
ernment honors had practically no result. His 
declared boycotting of British law courts has been 
a complete fiasco. The fourth project, of boycot- 
ting foreign goods and the manufacture in in- 
creasing volume of native articles—like cloth, 
with thread made on the spinning-wheel that is 
Gandhi’s symbol—met with a wonderful response 
at the moment. Yet in the year when Gandhi 
called upon India to return to the simple saucer- 
lamp, the importation of paraffin lamps doubled 
to 1,600,000. In the same year—when he was ap- 
pealing to India to return to the ox cart—9,000 
motor cars were imported as against 400 in the 
previous year. The fifth plank of non-payment of 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 97 


taxes and of civil disobedience, tried in one small 
area, collapsed. 

Gandhi’s policy of non-cooperation failed. It 
tried to fight the universal fact of the world today 
—the fact that the world is one. The tides of life 
flow now from every shore to every shore. King 
Canute’s task of sitting on the British beach and 
ordering the tide to stop its flow is exactly parallel 
with Gandhi sitting on the beach of India calling 
his people to wave back the tides of the world’s 
commerce and thought. 

How can a land to which liners ply and cables 
and wireless send messages, a land linked up with 
every continent of the world by the give-and-take 
of its goods and ideas, one of the eight great in- 
dustrial nations of the world, suddenly drop into 
a vacuum completely cut off from all the life of 
humanity? 

The policy of racial non-cooperation failed, too, 
because it is in itself morally wrong. 

Rabindranath Tagore has summed up this side 
of it in a message sent to the boys at his famous 
school at Bolpur: 

“The man who begins to erect a wall to block 
all the doors and windows of his house cannot be 
said to have any love for his house. On the other 
hand, the house owner who uses all possible means 
to get the light of day into all parts of his house 
really loves his house. When I found in the news- 
papers that Mahatma Gandhi was asking our 


98 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


ladies not to study the English language I realized 
that the erection of a wall round the country had 
commenced. 

“In other words, we have begun to believe that 
the way of salvation lies in our converting our 
own house into a prison! We have begun to wor- 
ship the darkness of our own house by excluding 
all the light of the outside world. We have for- 
gotten that those who forsake others and resolve 
to remain insignificant are forsaken by God 
exactly like those ferocious races who want to be- 
come great by attacking others.” * 


IV 


It is indeed an odd paradox that at the very 
moment when Gandhi was calling for “ non-co- 
operation,” India was making a new and unique 
stand in the center of world affairs. 

The new world status of India since the Great 
War is vividly thrown up by simply cataloging 
three events, all of which would have been in- 
credible before the war. First, India signed the 
Peace Treaty at Versailles as a distinct nation. 
Secondly, India, as a nation, was admitted an 
original member of the League of Nations. 
Thirdly, India is included by the International 
Labor Office of the League of Nations as one of 
the eight leading industrial nations of the world. 

1The Times [London], June 21st, 1921. 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 99 


All these three events are the recognition by 
the world at large—as well as by the British 
Commonwealth itself—that India is a distinct 
nation. 

India is delighted with this recognition of her 
nationhood. Yet the new status simply adds ex- 
asperation to her fury at finding her “ nationals” 
treated on a lower footing than other British 
citizens in some parts of the Commonwealth. 

On this question all India is at white heat— 
and is absolutely one. She is—as we have seen— 
internally divided about Swaraj; but she is welded 
into a single sword in her claim that India’s “ na- 
tionals” shall enjoy full equality of citizenship 
with all others in the British Commonwealth. 

That is the practical core of the race problem 
for Britain and India. And its importance is 
supreme. One of the most balanced, candid, and 
intimately informed of living observers, Professor 
Rushbrook Williams, Director of Public Informa- 
tion to the Government of India, believes that it 
is a pivot on which the world’s future swings. He 
says in India in 1922-1923* that the question of 
India’s status in the Commonwealth and her rela- 
tions with other elements in it forms “ perhaps the 
most formidable problem which has ever con- 


1 Published by the Government of India (Calcutta). This re- 
port is produced every year and is the best window into the cur- 
rent life of India. It may be purchased through the British 
Library of Information, 44 Whitehall Street, New York ($1.00). 
The italics in the quotation are ours. 


100 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


fronted the British Commonwealth as a whole; for 
upon its solution may well depend not merely the 
permanenee of the connection between the Indian 
and the British peoples, but also in no small 
measure the future peace of the world. 

“The impending struggle between Hast and 
West, foretold by many persons who cannot be 
classed either as visionaries or as fanatics, may 
easily be mitigated or even entirely averted, if the 
British Commonwealth of Nations can find a place 
within its wide compass for three hundred and 
twenty millions of Asiatics fully enjoying the 
privileges, and adequately discharging the respon- 
sibilities, which at present characterize the inhab- 
itants of Great Britain and the self-governing 
Dominions.” 

The question of status and relationship rouses 
furious passions on both sides and drives to the 
very root of the world’s race problem. It became 
concrete and dramatic in a scene at the Imperial 
Conference held in Whitehall in the autumn of 
1923. 

In that room the Prime Ministers of every part 
of the British Empire were present—a gathering 
that no single rule in all human history has ever 
paralleled for range and momentous importance. 
They set themselves to discuss this very question. 

Five years earlier two vital principles had been 
agreed to at the earlier meeting of this same Im- 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 101 


perial Conference in what is called the Reciprocity 
Resolution. That Resolution said that (1) each 
community in the British Empire had the right to 
control by immigration restrictions the composi- 
tion of its own population. But it recommended 
(2) that Indians should be allowed to visit and 
take up temporary residence in the Dominions and 
Colonies; that Indians already resident should be 
free to bring in their wives and children; and that 
the removal of civic and social disabilities should 
be considered. In 1921 the Imperial Conference 
reaffirmed this resolution and added: ‘ The Im- 
perial Conference accordingly is of the opinion 
that in the interests of the solidarity of the British 
Commonwealth it is desirable that the rights of 
such Indians to citizenship should be recognized.” 

We must keep clear the distinction between the 
attitude of the Dominions and Colonies (1) to 
immigration; (2) to those already living in the 
Dominion or Colony. 

Immigration for Indians is not the vital ques- 
tion at all. “There is,” said Sir Tej Bahadur 
Sapru at the Imperial Conference, “a growing 
sentiment in my country that we should not send 
our nationals outside anywhere. We do not want 
our nation outside India to appear as a nation of 
coolies.” An Indian would say, for instance, to 
South Africa or to Kenya Colony: “If you wish 
to say ‘No’ to immigrants when they knock at 


102 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


your door, we agree that you have—as we have— 
the right to do so. But your reason for saying 
‘No’ must not be—as ours must not be—on 
grounds of race; it can only be on grounds of 
economics or social welfare. It is reasonable to 
exclude men—Indian or white—who would throw 
your population out of work by working for low 
wages. It is not reasonable to exclude men be- 
cause they were born with a brown skin in India. 
To do so would, of course, admit a white burglar, 
but exclude a Prince Ranjitsinghi or a Rabin- 
dranath Tagore.” 

It is when you get down to the treatment of 
Indians already living in, say, South Africa, that 
the battle royal begins. And that is where it 
centered in the Conference of 1923. 

Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, representing India at 
that Imperial Conference, said: “I fight, as a 
subject of King George, for a place in his house- 
hold, and I will not be content with a place in his 
stables. When izzat [honor] is at stake, we prefer 
death to anything else. ... We attach far more 
importance to the honor of our ‘nationals’ in 
other parts of the Empire than probably you 
realize.” 

He proposed that the Dominion Governments 
who have an Indian population, and the Colonial 
Office in regard to Kenya, Uganda, Fiji, etce., 
where Indians are resident, appoint committees to 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 103 


confer with a committee appointed by the Govern- 
ment of India in “ exploring avenues how best and 
soonest the principle of equality (implicit in the 
1921 resolution*) may be implemented.” 

The Prime Ministers rose one after the other 
from Canada and Newfoundland, Australia, and 
New Zealand, and agreed that no race discrimina- 
tion should be made against Indians; and lamented 
that exclusion for economic or social reasons was 
in some cases necessary.” They all agreed that if 
a man of any race living in the Dominion could 
shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship, he 
should enjoy its privileges. 

Then General Smuts arose for South Africa to 
write “ No Thoroughfare” across the road. 


“Tt is the case of a small civilization [he 
said], a small community, finding itself in dan- 
ger of being overwhelmed by a much older and 
more powerful civilization, and it is the economic 
competition from people who have entirely dif- 
ferent standards and points of view from our- 
selves. ... 

“From the African point of view, what is the 
real difficulty? You have a continent inhabited 
by a hundred million blacks, where a few small 
white communities have settled down as the pio- 
neers of white civilization. You cannot blame 


1Qn the rights of Indians to citizenship. The proposal had 
been accepted by all save Australia and South Africa. 
2See quotations from their speeches in Chapter II. 


104 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


these .. . very small communities if they put up 
every possible fight for their own European ciyili- 
zation. They are not there to foster Indian 
civilization; they are there to foster Western 
civilization. 

“In South Africa in the Union we have a native 
population of over six million; a white population 
of over one and a half million; an Indian popula- 
tion of about 160,000 mostly confined to the Proy- 
ince of Natal. ...If an Indian franchise was 
given, the result would be that in Natal, certainly, 
you would at once have an Indian majority among 
the votes. 

“ But our difficulty is still greater. You have a 
majority of blacks in the Union, and if there were 
to be equal manhood suffrage over the Union, the 
whites would be swamped by the blacks. You 
cannot make a distinction between Indians and 
Africans. You would be impelled by the inevitable 
force of logic to go the whole hog. The result 
would be that not only would the whites be 
swamped in Natal by the Indians, but the whites 
would be swamped all over South Africa by the 
blacks, and the whole position for which we have 
striven for two hundred years or more would now 
be given up.... 

“For India it is a question of dignity. For 
white South Africa it is a question of existence. 

“TI do not think our Indian fellow subjects in 
South Africa can complain of injustice. It is just 
the opposite. They have prospered exceedingly in 
South Africa. . . . They have all the rights, bar- 
ring the rights of voting for Parliament and 
Provincial Councils, that white citizens in South 
Africa have. It is only political rights that are in 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 105 


question. There we are up against a stone wall 
and we cannot get over it.” * 


Let us look at the Indian in South Africa for 
amoment. There are 160,000 Indians there. They 
did not push themselves in. They were—for the 
most part—drawn into South Africa from India 
by white capital in South Africa recruiting for 
cheap and docile labor. The white man in South 
Africa has created his own Indian race problem 
in the same way that the white man in America 
created his Negro race problem; viz., by importing 
cheap, colored labor from abroad for his own 
benefit. 

There is no trouble in the Orange River Province 
because Asiatic immigration is not allowed at all. 
There is no trouble in the Cape Province because 
Cecil Rhodes’ policy of “equal rights for every 
civilized man” prevails. There is real trouble in 
Transvaal and in Natal Province because they 
have large Indian populations, but refuse citizen- 
ship. In Transvaal, where Boer feeling is strong, 
the Indian has no vote and no political represen- 
tation of any sort whatever; nor can Asiatics hold 
land. In Natal where the great majority of In- 
dians live they have a precarious town vote. 

The reason for the fiery race feeling that pre- 
vails in those two provinces is really economic 
and social. The Indian, imported by the white 


1 The whole of this and the other speeches in this classic debate 
may he read in The Times [London], November 2nd, 1923. 


106 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


man as a cheap tool, has become a drastic com- 
petitor with the small white shopkeeper; and his 
general standard of life is different. 

There is another stormy field in the Indian race 
battle on the African scene, Kenya Colony. ‘The 
principles are the same here as in South Africa. © 
The situation is however different in one impor- 
tant particular—Kenya is a Crown Colony, not a 
self-governing dominion. 

The British Government (in 19238) decided 
against the scheme that India would have accepted 
of absolute rule from the Colonial Office through 
a Governor, and in favor of a Colonial Office rule 
through a Governor with a council in which the 
white settlers’ vote predominates. It says that the 
real responsibility of Britain in Kenya is to look 
after the original inhabitant—the African. 

This is how the argument runs. If the Indian 
with his lower economic standard of living and 
his business faculty were allowed free immigra- 
tion and full citizenship, he would soon control 
Kenya. Not only so. It is likely that Rhodesia, 
Nyassaland, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya will 
be fused into one great Central African Province 
—possibly ultimately a self-governing dominion. 
So, if the Indian had free play, South and East 
Africa would be in danger of becoming a province 
of India. The British people and their govern- 
ment are trustees for the African. The African 
cannot defend himself or control his own land. 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 107 


So—at the risk of hardship to the Indian—the 
British must keep the Indian out of political and 
social control in Africa. 

This concern for the African would be more im- 
pressive if in Kenya the education and the medical 
care of the African, the protection of his land 
tenure and the reduction of his taxes, had held a 
central place in the white man’s mind before the 
Indian issue emerged. 

It will thus be seen that outside India itself 
there is—in Canada and Australia,’ in Kenya and 
South Africa—an Indian race problem that, as 
Mr. Rushbrook Williams says, affects the whole 
future destiny of the British Commonwealth and 
of world peace. To shake the allegiance of India 
to the British Commonwealth is to shake the entire 
fabric of which India is—in population—by far 
the greatest part. The repercussion of that shock 
would disturb the whole world. On the other 
hand, the solution of that race problem would in- 
evitably help toward solving every other race 
problem from Washington to Baghdad and the 
Philippines. 

Here, then, is another prodigious racial enigma 
—the riddle of how to reconcile the will of India to 
stand erect and free in the world of nations, and es- 
pecially in the British Commonwealth of Nations, 
with the white man’s will to protect and expand 
his own civilization and rule. How can India 


1 See Chapter IT. 


108 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


“see of the travail of her soul and be satisfied,” 
and Britain be true to its own priceless heritage? 

The solution of that problem will be discovered 
inevitably along the line of obedience to the prin- 
ciples of race relationship revealed in the Person 
who alone commands the reverent love of Hast 
and West and transcends all race rancor. 


Hasten the Kingdom, England; 
Look up across the narrow seas, 
Across the great white nations to thy dark imperial 
throne 
Where now three hundred million souls attend on 
thine august decrees; 
Ah, bow thine head in humbleness, the Kingdom is 
thine own: 
Not for the pride or power 
God gave thee this in dower; 
But, now the West and East have met and wept their 
mortal loss, 
Now that their tears have spoken 
And the long dumb spell is broken, 
Is it nothing that thy banner bears the red, eternal 
cross? + 


The Indian problem is, however, by no means 
limited to the relations of the British and Indian 
peoples. The friendly attitude of Indians to the 
United States has been shocked and is in danger 
of being profoundly altered by the decision of the 
Supreme Court in America that Indians can have 
no American nationality.’ 


1 Alfred Noyes. 
2See footnote, page 47. 


THE EXPANSION OF INDIA 109 


That decision makes the abuse of race division— 
i.e., of the clash of sheer color—sharper and more 
charged with antagonisms. 

What will be the issue of it all? 

One can imagine the Shades of the great in- 
vaders and rulers of India and the giant chiefs of 
old Empires and new Republics—Alexander and 
Julius Cesar, Mahmud and Akbar the Great, Na- 
poleon and Abraham Lincoln—sitting round under 
the open sky (as in a Greek theater), chin in hand, 
intently watching us as we today play this im- 
perial race drama on a stage vaster than any of 
them ever trod. | 

“What,” they ask, “will these moderns make 
of this? Failure and tragedy? Or some issue 
more wonderful than we ever conceived?” 

To all of them—save that gaunt last glorious 
figure, Lincoln—there was only one way with 
their race problems. At the best their solution 
was parcere subjectis et debellare superbos (“to 
spare the subservient and smash the rebel”). 

But we are committed to another ruling prin- 
ciple—by the Faith that we hold. Britain rules— 
she can only rule—not as a tyrant, nor even a 
benevolent despot, but as a trustee. And America 
may well exercise a decisive influence on the world 
problem by her example. We are all stewards for 
an estate that is not, in the last resort, if we really 
are living in a spiritual universe, ours to do with 
as we will 


CHAPTER V 
THE WORLD TEAM 
I 


STANDING on the touchline of the football field of 
the American University at Beirut on a crisp 
afternoon in spring, I saw streaming down from 
the pavilion a team such as I had never before 
even imagined in my wildest athletic dreams. 

The captain was an Abyssinian, thickset, but 
a fast and accurate shot. His full-backs were a 
Turk and an Armenian; the half-backs and the 
forwards included a Syrian Christian from the 
Lebanon, a Greek, other Turks, a Persian, and a 
Copt from Egypt. Their trainer was an Irishman. 
The principal of the college and many of the 
faculty were American. In the college were nine 
hundred boys from all those lands. 

The football field was on Asiatic soil; but the 
people represented were drawn, not only from four 
separate races in Asia—the Syrian Arab, the 
Armenian, the Turk, and the Persian—but the 
Abyssinian came from Africa, the Greek from 
Europe, the trainer from the British Isles, and the 
principal from America. Every continent had its 


man. All the world was represented. 
110 


THE WORLD TEAM 111 


As I stood watching the members of the team 
take their places and the opposing team move out 
to face them, and then heard the whistle blow and 
saw the game surge down and up the field, I could 
see that they were playing a really magnificent 
team game. Talking with the sports-captain of 
the college who was standing by me I asked, 
‘What special difficulty do you find in training 
a team like this? ” 

“A real hard nut to crack,” he replied, “is just 
this. These fellows come from countries where 
the whole idea of team-play is unknown. Each 
at the beginning of his football training wants to 
dribble the ball down the field at his own feet and 
score the goal himself for his own glory. It is 
just the same,” he interjected, “if you are teach- 
ing them baseball or cricket or hockey. So,” 
he went on, “I have won the battle, not only for 
the boy as a member of the team, but really for 
his whole life-job, when I have taught him to 
pass.” 

I looked again and realized the simple miracle 
that had been performed. There was the Ar- 
menian full-back—whose father had been mas- 
sacred by a Turk—passing to the Turk who sent 
the ball out to a forward wing, the Greek, and he 
to the Persian, who centered to the African cap- 
tain, who, amid a roar of cheering from the col- 
lege, scored a brilliant goal. 

As I locked across the field to the intense blue 


112 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


waters of the Mediterranean that broke in a white 
fringe of foam on the rocks below, the whole hu- 
man scene’ that we have been looking upon in this 
book flashed into my mind. The world, I saw, is 
just such a football field. The problem of the 
world racial conflict is precisely the same as the 
problem of the sports captain at Beirut. There 
are the nations on that vast world field—each try- 
ing to dribble the ball of achievement down the 
field of history, to score the goal of racial or na- 
tional glory for itself. There is no team-play on 
a world scale. The need of the human race is for 
a World International Team. 

Indeed—in that very hour when I was at Beirut 
—something was emerging on that world field so 
awful that it would have stunned us all, if we had 
caught but a glimpse of it. For it was the spring 
of 1914; and already forces were in play that, be- 
fore the summer had come and gone, were to fling 
those nations and races into the titanic conflict 
that shattered the world. Because there was no 
world team in being, ten million young men and 
senior schoolboys who were alive at that hour are 
today maimed for life or lying under hummocks of 
earth over which the grass blows in Britain and 
Europe, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Africa. 

As Mr. Winston Churchill says: “It is a tale of 
the torture, mutilation, or extinction of millions 
of men, and of the sacrifice of all that was best and 
noblest in an entire generation. The crippled, 


THE WORLD TEAM 113 


broken world in which we dwell today is the inheri- 
tor of these awful events.” 

We look again over the world field today and find 
the whole earth, in a new and almost universal 
sense, the scene of a tense unparalleled struggle 
between the two forces that the sports-captain 
threw up so vividly on that Syrian football field: 
the one force that makes a nation strive fiercely to 
keep the ball at its own feet, and the other force 
that—like the athletic trainer—shouts, “ Pass, men, 
—pass! Play the game for the great game itself 
and for the team.” 


It 


Why should a world-team spirit be needed today 
more than at any time in the world’s history? 

The answer lies—as we have already seen—in al- 
most everything that we see or handle, eat or drink 
or wear. The very football itself—with its bladder 
made of rubber from the Malay Archipelago or 
Africa, and its case of leather shipped from South 
America—is an example of the inescapable fact 
that we and the other races are all interdependent, 
“bound up in the bundle of life together.” 

The result is that there can never more be an 
isolated fight between two nations—a “scrap” (so 
to speak) in the alley between two boys in the world 
school. Every fight involves the whole school. 
Every war in the future must be a world war. And 


114 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


this will mean inevitably that the flame of any fu- 
ture war will rage across every race till it has 
burned itself out and only the charred ruins of 
civilization remain; and in those ruins starving 
human packs “ looting for non-existent food.” 

In a word—to quote Lord Bryce’s tragic epi- 
gram—* If we do not destroy war, war will destroy 
us.” Man as a civilized being must learn to be a 
team—or perish. 

What, then, is the central obstacle between the 
world as we have it today and the creation of a 
human team? 

If you sat in a café in Budapest and asked the 
Hungarians why they did not work in the team 
spirit with the Czechs; or if you talked with Arab 
camel-men round a Bedouin camp fire in the Jordan 
valley and asked, ‘*‘ Why do you not link up with the 
Jews? ” you would—when you recovered conscious- 
ness in hospital—have leisure to meditate on the 
fury of national and racial antagonisms. Those 
volcanic antagonisms—burning more or _ less 
fiercely, aS we have seen in this book—are throw- 
ing up a vast seismic upheaval. The foree of the 
upheaval is the passion for “ self-determination ” 
that burns now in all peoples. The competing 
forces meet everywhere. In Europe they are na- 
tional and partly racial: Slav versus Teuton, Latin 
versus Teuton, and soon. Beyond Europe they are 
largely racial and partly national—we talk of them 
in terms of color, black and white in Africa and in 


THE WORLD TEAM 115 


America; brown and white in India; yellow and 
brown and white on the shores of the Pacific. It is 
the clash of color; mainly the resistance of the 
other races to white domination. 

This has led many men—some of them of great 
brilliance of mind—to say: first, that the root-facts 
of the physical and mental differences of the races 
cause this conflict ; secondly, that you cannot change 
those great fundamental facts of race; therefore 
thirdly, you must have race war; and fourthly, you 
had better face the fact and prepare to resist the 
demand of the other races by the united armed 
force of all the white man’s numbers and wealth and 
capacity. 

Never in this world was a more terrific and ter- 
rible conclusion reached on such crude scientific 
evidence. The fact is that the wisest minds are still 
on the very threshold of knowledge as to what is 
meant by race. The scientists are still in high and 
vehement debate on every major question affecting 
our views of race. They are fighting over different 
theories of heredity—the very root of race; of race 
psychology; of the effect of education on race char- 
acter, and a score of other vital factors. When 
Wwe come down to these root questions, ‘“ What 
is race?”—“On what are race antagonisms 
founded? ”—‘“ In what does race superiority con- 
sist? ” we are bewildered. 

They look so simple. Yet it is absolutely true to 
say that the issue raised by the clash of color never 


116 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


has been thought through. On a local scale, it is 
an ancient issue; but it is, on a world scale, a new 
problem. ‘It is the greatest problem confronting 
mankind as a whole. It must be solved by us in our 
generation. 

Let us try to analyze these questions in the con- 
crete facts that lie in front of us. 

Race—taken in its modern scientific meaning— 
has to do with the physical character of man. It 
divides men by what you can photograph of them— 
their bodily externals, by the shape of their heads 
(broad or narrow, long or round), by the color of 
their skin, by the straightness or curliness and the 
color of their hair, and so on. It is a matter of 
anatomy. The scientific race expert is the anthro- 
pologist. 

Yet the moment you begin to apply this science 
to the modern race conflicts that make our race 
problem, you are tangled in an inextricable, be- 
wildering skein of contradictions. The European is 
white and the Indian brown, we say. Yes. But 
racially there are three different races in Europe: 
the tall, narrow-headed, blonde ‘‘ Nordic ” man with 
blue eyes and fair hair; the round-headed, stocky, 
short, dark “ Alpine” man; the narrow-headed, 
short, brunette “Mediterranean” man. For in- 
stance, if you motor in France from St. Malo to 
Marseilles, you will in succession meet all three of 
these races in large masses: the Nordic in the north- 
ern plains; the Alpine in Brittany and the Central 


THE WORLD TEAM Ei 


Massif; the Mediterranean in Aquitaine and the 
Lower Rhone Valley. So, to start with, we have 
the confusion that a race is not a nation and a na- 
tion may contain three races. These racially dif- 
ferent men in France all fight side by side against 
a common foe. 

But here a still greater complication rears itself 
in our path. The “Nordic” fair Englishman is 
racially nearer to the narrow-headed Indian of say 
Benares, and to the Persian of Teheran, than he is 
to the pure Welshman or the Highlander in his own 
island and of his own nation. 

Not only so, but the Indian of Benares is fur- 
ther removed racially from the Indian of Madras 
than he is from the Englishman of London, or the 
American of Washington. Indeed, the Brahmin 
Indian is racially as remote from the pure Dravid- 
ian of South India as a Scotsman is from a Hotten- 
tot; yet the Brahmin and the Dravidian unite in the 
Indian Swaraj movement as members of one race 
movement for self-determination. 

Again, the German Jew fought the Russian Jew 
and the French Jew in the war; for the Jews 
though united in one race are divided into more 
than a score of nationalities. Yet they have a very 
strong common feeling of race. The thing becomes 
more startling still when we discover that the Brit- 
ish may set a Jew—like Lord Reading—to rule In- 
dia; the Turks may hail a national leader in a Jew 
like Tekin Alp; and the Russians another in Lenin. 


118 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


Arabs flame into ungovernable fury at the very 
notion of Jews invading their ancient homelands in 
Palestine. The “race conflict ” between Arab and 
Jew is today as vehement and acute as any antag- 
onism in the world. But the true Jews and the true 
Arabs are both of the Semitic race. Indeed the Jew 
and the Arab who leap at one another’s throats 
together constitute almost all the pure Semites now 
living on the earth! This may sound confusing and 
so it is, for the very facts of race are a bewildering 
medley. Butit may open up an astonishing simpli- 
fication if it leads us to distrust the race war dog- 
matism of the brilliant Lothrop Stoddard school, 
and to dig deeper for the root realities of race. 

There are, of course, relatively pure races like 
the Chinese and the Bantu Negro—though the lat- 
ter has absorbed some sub-races. But the Chinese 
are less race conscious and arouse less race antag- 
onisms than almost any people on earth; and the 
Bantu are still so divided into tribes ignorant of 
each other’s existence that race consciousness is 
only vivid in them where it has been stung into life 
by the white man’s presence. 

Does not that last sentence unconsciously throw, 
a gleam of simplifying light into our tangle? The 
Negro first becomes race conscious when he con- 
fronts the white Europeans and Americans. He 
does not think about his skin being black and about 
a united black race till he sees the white man and 
feels he has to fight for his own rights. Race con- 


THE WORLD TEAM 119 


sciousness comes first from his sense of difference 
from another people, secondly, from his feeling of 
a common Negro cause against what he feels to be 
an oppressive white people. 

Follow this clue a little further. We find on 
analysis that there is very little feeling of race con- 
flict in British West Africa, there is some race 
conflict in Kenya Colony, and much in southern 
Rhodesia. Why? 

The white and the black are there in West, East, 
and Central Africa. If color was the cause of con- 
flict, we should find the same fight in all three 
places. The main cause of the difference is that 
in southern Rhodesia the white man has taken 
from the Negro most of his land; in Kenya Colony 
the white man has taken some and the N egro does 
not know how long the rest will stay in his hands; 
in British West Africa the white man has left ite 
land to the Negro who cultivates enormous cocoa 
and other crops and sells them to the white. There 
are other causes, like the fight of skilled white 
labor in southern Rhodesia to keep the black and 
the colored man down in the ranks of unskilled 
labor. But in both Rhodesia and Kenya the cause 
of the conflict is economic; and in the case of the 
land it is sentimental as well as economic. Itisa 
conflict over wages, over land tenure, and over the 
economic standard of living. 

Look again to the Pacifie Ocean. Why does 
Australian labor erect the principle of “ White 


120 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


Australia” into a religion? Simply and essentially 
because the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Indian 
have a very much lower standard of living and are 
so innumerable that, if they sailed down the Pacific 
in their hundreds of thousands and landed and 
worked and multiplied in Australia, they would 
undercut the Australian in the Labor Market and 
oust him altogether from his work, and therefore 
at last squeeze him out and make Australia a proy- 
ince of Asia, there would arise, the Australian be- 
lieves, in Australia—only far more intensely— 
the strained situation that you already have in 
South Africa, where practically no unskilled labor 
is ever done by any white man, and where the col- 
ored population enormously outnumbers the white. 
Here, again, the race problem of the Pacific (the 
antagonism of the white to the colored and the re- 
ciprocal anger of the colored) is, as in Africa, due 
to economic causes. 

“But,” the reader says, “if you trace the race 
conflict to economic fears and angers in Africa 
and Australia, you surely cannot apply that idea 
to India.” 

We will turn, then, to examine the Indian scene 
in the light of what we have already read. What 
is the central cause of all the unrest there—the 
fiery nationalism, the making of common cause 
between Hindu and Moslem, Punjabi and Bengali, 
against the British? The answer is clear—the 


1See Chapter IV. 


THE WORLD TEAM 121 


cause is a political desire for self-governing institu- 
tions and for authority in their own household. 
The writer is convinced that if the British frankly 
and sincerely said, “ We are now going to leave 
India,” and started to go, the vast majority of 
Indian nationalists would equally frankly and 
sincerely say, “ No, we desire you to stay and to live 
here and work our institutions with us.” 

“How inconsistent!” a critic exclaims. 

Surely, however, there would be no real incon- 
sistency. The difference would be almost essentially 
one of feeling, but none the less profound and very 
real. The British are there in India today as con- 
querors gradually giving self-government—in in- 
stalments at their own discretion; then they would 
be guests sharing self-government with the Indians 
at their invitation. If I apply the difference be- 
tween the two situations to my own home, I at once 
see that it is fundamental. 

Again, then,—if our analysis of the cause of race 
conflict between white and brown in India is true,— 
the root reason for it is not race, but a conception of 
political freedom. 

If we have been able to analyze these race con- 
flicts and find in each case a cause that is economic 
or political, why have those causes become so con- 
fused that we have come to see the whole set of 
world antagonisms as racial? 

The first reason is one of simple psychology. 

If two white men are in a prize fight and one 


122 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


fouls the other, we say he isacad. But if, say, Siki 
fights Carpentier and is guilty of a foul, we say 
“That is the Negro.” I automatically blame the 
thing I resent upon the thing I can see; 7.e.,—in the 
above instance,—on his color, his race. 

Let us apply that idea to our problem. The 
white races of the West have reached a higher stage 
of economic and political development than any 
other of the races. Either, therefore, they have 
got control of the land and of the people of those 
other races—as in Africa; or they want to exclude 
them from their own white lands—as in Australia 
and America—because of their lower standards; 
or they have seized the reins of government—as in 
India. The consequent conflict—which is economic 
and political in essence—naturally seems to be 
racial. 

A critic may say here, however, “‘ You are flying 
in the face of the fact that there is an instinctive 
repulsion felt between the races.” 

But is there an instinctive repulsion? A white 
baby or little child is as fond of its brown ayah or 
yellow amah or black mammy as it is of a white 
nurse. And even adults when they get to know 
individual Negroes, as servants for instance, or as 
students in their classes, far from feeling repulsion, 
will often speak of them with enthusiasm and real 
affection. The repulsion is felt (when it is felt) 
by older people after the influence of the general 


THE WORLD TRAM 123 


group or mob-mind has infected the attitude of 
the growing boy and the man with race feeling. 

A naturalist recently saw some tiny ducklings 
newly hatched on the water’s edge. They took no 
notice of him and were quite happy when he picked 
them up and fondled them. He then walked away. 
As he did so, he noticed the mother duck waddling 
down with frantic speed to the ducklings and, gath- 
ering them about her, quacking furiously for some 
minutes. He then walked down to the water’s edge 
again, but the tiny ducklings fled in terror and 
throwing themselves into the water paddled away 
for dear life from the dreaded monster-man whom 
they had five minutes earlier allowed to handle 
them quite unmoved. It was clear that the fear was 
not instinctive. The mother duck had induced fear 
of man in the ducklings—not a fear of this man 
simply, but a generalized dread of and antagonism 
to man as man. 

That same almost hypnotic power of suggestion 
works on the young life of one race of man as 
against another race. I know Indians who really 
want to know Englishmen, but who find the greatest 
difficulty in meeting the Briton without a strong 
irrepressible feeling of race repulsion, because, 
first, they have been surrounded by a caste tradition 
which bars out the white man as a defiling outcaste; 
and, secondly, because they have been surrounded 
by fiercely nationalist groups of friends and rela- 


124 THH CLASH OF COLOR 


tives who have induced hate of the dominant yet 
despised barbarian white. Yet this caste contempt 
and race hate of the white are neither of them 
rooted in the nature of things. They are not in- 
stinctive. They are induced—suggested—by old 
and new sectional loyalties, loyalties to caste and to 
race. 

The same is true of the white contempt for color 
where it is found. The white man who today 
threatens to boot an Indian out of his first-class 
railway compartment in India was one of the pre- 
war generation of English schoolboys who hung in 
mute hero worship on every swift, graceful stroke of, 
the brilliant batting of “ Ranji,” Prince Ranjit- 
singhi, in the days when he was the idol of the 
world of cricket. 

The theory of instinctive race repulsion is not 
scientific. It is not true to the facts. 

A gauntlet of challenge may, however, here be 
thrown down by a critic who says to us: “ Yes, 
the difference may be, as you argue, economic and 
political; but the white man has got higher than 
the other races in those respects because of his 
essential race superiority. And that superiority 
rests on his better brains and nobler spirit; and he 
must keep on top at all costs.” * 

What is race superiority? Can we doubt that 
there is such a thing—that indeed it is the most 


1 This is the argument of a very powerful school of writers of 
whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard in his Rising Tide of Color is the 
most popular and effective. 


THE WORLD TEAM 125 


real thing in the modern world, and that it is pos- 
sessed by the white peoples? 

You are—let us say—a midshipman aboard an 
oil-fed naval grayhound: 


A ram-you, damn-you cruiser, 
With a brace of bucking screws, 


carrying a thousand men and boys and some stu- 
pendous guns that can throw a ton projectile and 
hit an invisible target twenty miles distant. You 
feel the deck quivering under your feet as the 
screws hurl this fifty thousand tons of concentrated 
scientific engineering miracle at twenty-five knots 
an hour through trackless oceans. And all the 
time you can talk by wireless across a hundred 
leagues of water to other cruisers, and can take the 
Greenwich time to a tenth of a second by listening 
to a clock ticking in the Eiffel Tower a thousand 
miles away.’ 

All of this your own race has invented and 
created. 

The gray sleuth hound comes to anchor in Bom- 
bay Harbor. Bombay was a little Indian village 
which King Charles II of England rented to the 
East India Company for £10 a year. Your search- 
lights play on it and reveal interminable wharves 
where the world’s shipping loads and unloads costly 


1I was recently on a British liner in the Atlantic whose wire- 
less operator told me he had taken the Eiffel Tower time by 
wireless when over four thousand miles away, off the coast of 
South America. 


126 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


freights; they show you factories, warehouses, of- 
fices, palaces of millionaire merchant-princes, well- 
lighted streets, in which move purring Rolls-Royces 
and clanging electric cars—a city of wonder and 
wealth round what is now the queen of Asia’s har- 
bors. That busy, prosperous city is—you feel— 
the creation of the brain and organizing energy of 
the white race. The ordered government of the 
three hundred million folk in India is itself the 
gift of the white race to India. 

Heaving anchor, your cruiser swings out on the 
long trail East. In Colombo and Singapore, in 
Hongkong and Sydney, the same story is unfolded, 
with the Orient’s enchanting variations of color 
and line and sound. You hear at Hongkong of the 
break up of China by the tuchuwns—the provincial 
war lords who defy the government of Peking; 
and it strikes you that the white race might step 
in and by force impose on China the peace given 
to India. Japan gives you a moment’s pause as 
you see her great and efficient cruisers nosing round 
yours, but you recall that she has become a first- 
class power by brilliantly copying the white West. 

An officer on board tells you of his experiences 
at the end of the war, when he crossed Africa from 
the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic; threading the 
forests of Kenya, plunging down to the shores of 
Lake Tanganyika, paddling by canoe past the vil- 
lages of the Upper Congo, on for two thousand 
miles and more till he reached the cocoa plantations 


THE WORLD TEAM 127 


of the West Coast. And all the life of all the tribes 
in Central Africa had, he says, never produced any- 
thing of what we call civilization; while now the 
boys and girls are multiplying fast because the 
head-hunter, the witch doctor, infanticide, inter- 
tribal war, the Arab slave hunting have been largely 
stopped since the white man has taken charge. 

Race superiority! One does not so much state 
it, as take it so for granted as almost to forget that 
it can ever be challenged. It seems so obvious. 

Let us, however, stand back and take a steady 
look at the scene through a time telescope. 

Imagine an educated Nubian Negro scribe in 
40 B.c. going down the Nile delta from the sumptu- 
ous imperial magnificence of Cleopatra’s Court, 
and sailing across the Great Sea to Rome in one of 
the Imperial corn ships. Walking in the Capital 
of the World, in those paved streets between houses 
roofed with gilded bronze, among marble temples 
and baths and theaters of indescribable beauty, he 
would hear of strange savage islands that Cesar 
had invaded only some ten years ago. Imagine the 
Egyptian Negro scholar riding northward along the 
paved road driven straight like a javelin across 
Europe and at last sailing across the narrow foggy 
channel at the peril of his life. He would find the 
Savages of Britain dressed in skins at their worship, 
burning men alive to appease their gods; and with 
their kings and petty chiefs living in wood and 
wattle huts in primitive squalor. 


128 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


A hundred and fifty years later—let us say—a 
philosopher-prince from India leaves the court of 
the Buddhist Emperor Kanishka at Peshawar, with 
the beauty and the grandeur of its marble build- 
ings sparkling with jewels and gold, and with the 
fervor of its austere religious philosophy. He 
travels up the Khyber Pass across the plateaus of 
Nearer Asia and the Roman roads of Anatolia and 
Europe to what has now become the northernmost 
frontier of the Roman Empire. He stands on one 
of Agricola’s forts in Britain, and looking north 
he catches glimpses of the shaggy, barbarous Cale- 
donians lurking among the gorse and raiding in 
search of loot. Or a Chinese pupil of the great his- 
torian Panyang * goes from Chinese Turkestan over 
the same plateaus and Roman roads to North 
Europe and sees the Angles and Saxons cutting 
each other to pieces in intertribal wars. 

Would it not seem self-evident to the Chinese 
faced by his fellow scholars at home, to the Indian, 
as he retailed his adventures to the astonished 
pundits and philosophers in the imperial jewelled 
halls of Peshawar, and to the Nubian, as he re- 
turned and walked through the immense avenues 
of the temples and palaces of Egypt or sat writing 
his experiences on his papyri in the great library 
of the Pharaohs, that those scattered tribes of 
Angles and Saxons, those brutish Britons and sav- 


1Panyang who was in touch with India and the West died 
A.D. 124, 


THE WORLD TEAM 129 


age Scots were of a “lesser breed without the 
Law ”’? 

The intrinsic racial superiority of the Indian, the 
Chinese and the Egyptian Negro over the Briton 
and the Saxon would seem as self-evident and as 
incontrovertible to them as does that of the Briton 
and American today over the Hottentot and savage 
Papuan. 

Here is an account of the practices attributed to 
the natives of a savage island, written by an Italian 
general who landed there in the course of a 
campaign. 


The inhabitants of the interior do not sow corn, 
but live on milk and flesh, and clothe themselves 
in skins. All of them dye their bodies with the 
juice of a plant, which stains them blue, and makes 
them look very terrible in battle. They wear their 
hair long. . . . Sets of ten or twelve have wives 
in common between them, and when children are 
born they are considered to belong to the one who 
first married the mother. . . . Those who are ill 
of any serious disease and those who engage in war 
or other dangerous occupations either offer up 
human beings as sacrifices, or make vows to offer 
up themselves. They think that their gods cannot 
be appeased except by offering up life for life. 
They have public sacrifices of this kind. Some of 
them have huge wicker-work images which they 
stuff full of living men and women, and then set 
fire to the whole and burn them to death. They 
think that their gods like the sacrifice of thieves 
and robbers and other criminals best, but if there 


130 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


are not enough of them, they offer up innocent 
victims. . . . The men have the power of life and 
death over their wives and children. If a well-to- 
do person dies, his relatives meet together, and if 
there is any reason to suspect foul play, torture his 
wives to find out the truth. If anything is dis- 
covered, they put the wives to death with all kinds 
of torments. ... 


The reader will have recognized that the writer 
is Julius Cesar * and that the savages were inhabi- 
tants of the British Isles and of North Europe. 

If a Roman writer had suggested to Ceesar that 
those British islands would some day be the origin 
and center of an empire by the side of which that 
Roman Empire over which he ruled would be 
dwarfed, he would have been hailed with derision 
and laughter for his midsummer madness. As 
Lord Macaulay puts it: ‘‘ Nothing in the early 
existence of Britain indicated the greatness which 
she was destined to attain. Her inhabitants, when 
first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, 
were little superior to the natives of the Sandwich 
Islands.” ? 

So to the conquering eye of Julius Cesar as 
he dictated the De Bello Gallico, or even to the 
sympathetic insight which Tacitus displays in his 
fascinating sketch Agricola, our ancestors in North 
Europe and in Britain were “ the backward races 
of the Empire,” just as the Africans and Papuans 


1 Cesar, De Bello Gallico, V. 14; VI. 16; VI. 19. 
2 Macaulay, History of England, Chapter I. 


THE WORLD TEAM 131 


are to the war historians of the twentieth century 
—the Winston Churchills and the John Buchans 
of today. 

The rise of the white races of Northern Europe 
and their domination of the world is, then, a recent 
thing—a mushroom growth viewed in the long per- 
Spectives of history. 

One of the greatest scientific authorities on the 
causes of race domination is Dr. Vaughan Cornish, 
who lectured for the British War Office throughout 
the Great War to officers and N.C.O.’s at the train- 
ing centers in England and at the Army Training 
Corps Schools on the Western front, and has since 
by official request written the British textbook for 
Army promotion examinations in Imperial Military 
Geography. In that book,’ in a valuable and search- 
ing passage on “the relative efficiency of Occiden- 
tals and Orientals,” he says: 


The superior strength of Occidental (1.e., West- 
ern) as compared with Asiatic states is relatively 
modern. . . 

There had been a time when the Asiatics were 
well abreast of Europeans in such studies [chemis- 
try, physics, mathematics], and we must therefore 
note the time when Europe began to draw rapidly 
ahead. This was about the beginning of the six- 
teenth century, and the date is evidently connected 
with the commencement of trans-oceanic voyages. 
The crossing of the Atlantic, which made western 
Kurope, including the British Isles, the center in- 


1A Geography of Imperial Defence. 


132 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


stead of aw terminus of maritime communications, 
brought with it new requirements in practical as- 
tronomy, and there soon followed great improve- 
ments in mathematics, in the instruments for re- 
cording time and measuring angles and in optical 
aids to observation. On this foundation was mod- 
ern physics built, and hence the mastery of physi- 
cal and chemical forces which resulted was localized 
in Europe where oceanic navigation originated. 

Moreover, the habit of visiting countries, which 
followed upon the use of the world’s common high- 
way, immensely widened European knowledge of 
the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms. Not only 
was the knowledge of Europeans widened, but their 
receptivity was developed. Asiatics, whose situa- 
tion is less favorable for oceanic navigation, were 
content to let Europeans be the common carriers 
at sea and consequently missed a valuable stimulus 
to the appetite for knowledge. It is suggestive that 
the first Asiatic nation to recover equality with 
Europeans in national efficiency should be the 
Japanese, whose geographical conditions, taking 
account both of climate and communications, are 
most nearly allied to those of western Europe. 

In the early Middle Ages, before the time of 
ocean sailing, when the roads of Europe had fallen 
into disrepair and movement was wider and freer 
in Asia, the Asiaties were at least as quick as the 
Europeans in picking up knowledge. If the develop- 
ment of railways and motor traffic should presently 
begin to outpace that of marine transport, there 
may be a recovery of relative efficiency in the more 
continental and less maritime parts of the world. 

The fluctuations of national efficiency which have 
followed on change of trade routes warns us there- 


THE WORLD TEAM 133 


fore against the assumption that no other Orientals 
besides the Japanese will regain equality with 
Occidentals. If this should occur, the Occidentals 
will not maintain their present preponderating 
influence in the world unless in the future they form 
a larger proportion of the world’s population than 
they do today. At present they are outnumbered 
in the proportion of at least two to one. 


The present white superiority is, therefore, if 
this scientific military strategist is right, not neces- 
sarily permanent. It is of recent growth; it may 
not persist for long. 


iil 


Three things which, if they are true, revolution- 
ize our picture of the possibilities of the future, 
have been put forward in this chapter. 

The first is that, while each nation and each 
race has and ought to have its own life and person- 
ality and we ought to give devoted loyalty to our 
own country, as to our home, yet “ patriotism is 
not enough.” We want—we shall always want— 
the “nation” with its own genius and art and 
literature and music; but in the team with other 
nations joining in the team play of the world’s life. 
As the Hon. Newton Rowell, K.C., has said in The 
British Empire and World Peace: “Two of the 
outstanding lessons of modern history are that the 
Nation-State is no longer an adequate form of 


134 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


political organization to meet the needs of human 
society, and that force is no longer a sane or prac- 
ticable method of permanently settling disputes be- 
tween nations.” 

That in a single sentence is the problem that we 
of this generation must solve—to get the ‘‘ Nation- 
States ” together for team work. 

Through the spirit of the smaller group—that of 
the nation—we come to the fuller spirit of the 
larger, indeed the largest group—humanity. As 
that great social psychologist, Professor William 
McDougall, has said: “The group spirit, rising 
above the level of a narrow patriotism that regards 
with hostility all its rivals, recognizes that only 
through the further development of the collective 
life of nations can man rise to higher levels than 
he has yet known, and become the supreme agent 
of human progress.” 

In a word, the idea of the world team is the main- 
spring of the advance of the nations of men in the 
future. That team would be impossible if race hate 
is in the very nature of man. But already we have 
discovered, secondly, that—so far from the facts 
of race (color, skull-shape, hair, temperament, and 
so on) being the cause of race antagonism, what 
we call race hate really rises from such facts as 
differences of standards of living and consequent 
wage rivalry, and the desire for political freedom. 
These things are at the root of race hatred. The 
economic and political fight rages round “ color” 


THH WORLD TEAM 135 


because the white man is on the one side—that of 
higher economic standards and stronger, longer 
government experience—and the “ colored” races 
on the other. 

Race antagonism we have discovered is not rooted 
in primitive instinct—it is not present in the 
natural child; it is put there through suggestion 
and education by the adult. It is not fundamental; 
it need not exist. This discovery breaks the terrible 
tyranny of race antagonism over man. He can 
conquer and destroy race war. We can “ wipe out ” 
our enemies by “ wiping out” our enmities. 

The third thing is, that on the highest authority 
—as well as from our own outlook on history—the 
world domination of the white man is a recent 
growth and is not likely to persist indefinitely. 

What, then, is needed to achieve the ideal of the 
world team on the plane of our life here and now? 
We need in the affairs of man some real and power- 
ful force that will fuse the separate national and 
racial spirits into a unity. We need a King Arthur 
idea and ideal to gather the warring knights into 
a Round Table of world chivalry to cooperate in 
defending the distressed and the weak and in fight- 
ing for world peace. 

We turn to look for such a practical foree—some- 
thing that will do for man what the team spirit 
did for the Turk and Armenian, Greek, Abyssinian, 
Persian and Syrian on that football field at Beirut. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE REAL WAR 
I 


“ OuT,” said the umpire. 

It was one of the critical cricket matches of the 
season. Trinity College, Kandy, one of Ceylon’s 
seven public schools, could count itself fortunate 
that the crack batsman of the opposing side was 
caught after he had made only three runs. The 
Trinity captain, however, stepped up to the umpire 
and said, “I think he did not hit the ball with his 
bat; it glanced off his leg-pads, so he is not really 
out.” 

The umpire reversed his decision. The batsman 
came back and made a high score for his side against 
Trinity College. 

It was technically against the rules of cricket 
to suggest a reversal of the umpire’s decision; 
but, however much we may criticize the technical 
error, it was in the spirit of good sportsmanship 
that that boy acted—the son of a tribal Kandyan 
chieftain, senior prefect of his school and captain of 
the cricket eleven. Indeed, here was something that 
was greater even than the team spirit of passing on 


to the other man on our side. It was the spirit of 
136 


THE REAL WAR 137 


playing the game with absolute fairness to the op- 
ponent, playing the game for the game’s sake. 

As you look at the act and then look from it 
to the outside world of race rancor, international 
evasion, subterfuge, and sharp practice, you can- 
not escape the conviction that it is in the spread of . 
the spirit of that cricket captain into the world 
of racial and national relationship that the hope 
of the future lies. John Galsworthy, indeed, after 
looking at the failure of literature and art and even 
science, which is, he says, “more hopeful of per- 
fecting poison gas than of curing cancer,” turns 
to this very spirit and says: 

“Sport, which still keeps the flag of idealism 
flying, is perhaps the most saving grace in the world 
at the moment, with its spirit of rules kept and 
regard for the adversary, whether the fight is going 
for or against. When, if ever, the fair-play spirit 
of sport reigns over international affairs, the cat 
force which rules there now will slink away and 
human life emerge for the first time from the 
jungle.” * 

We naturally turn then to ask how it has come 
about that this Singhalese boy and the team and the 
school itself to which he belonged have acquired the 
spirit of fair play and fellowship. The college, 
which had changed his whole outlook on life and 
made him the sportsman and convinced Christian 
that he is, has in it five hundred and fifty boys. 


1The Times [London], October 29th, 1923. 


138 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


They are boys of all ages, from nine to nineteen; of 
all shades of color, from white to dark brown; boys 
of over a dozen race divisions, including Singhalese 
and Tamil, Burmese and Burgher, English and 
Scottish, Negro Baganda from Africa and Chinese; 
and of many religions, including Buddhist, Hindu, 
Moslem, and Christian; boys who put up a cricket 
team that has won every match in the season in the 
Island Competition, and who plunge down into the 
slums of Kandy to take first aid to people who are 
ill and poor, and to carry them off for boating 
excursions. 

These boys—with their splendid airy white school 
buildings, their schoolhouses, lecture halls, their 
chapel now being built on the beautiful oriental 
lines of an old Singhalese temple, their sports 
grounds, swimming baths, and so on—might well 
confine their keenness to the school itself. But they 
know that school patriotism is not enough. The 
school must give itself to something larger. 

So “Trinity ” has, for instance, instituted the 
Kandy Social Service League under which the boys 
—in cooperation with other people—have helped 
the poor to fight starvation in the food crises, and 
have joined in “ clean-up ” days to fight the plague. 
Working at the request of the Municipality with the 
Municipal Inspectors, they have helped to clear out 
the filthy nooks and corners of the town, to get the 
people to destroy their plague-ridden rubbish, and 
to transfer them from the evacuated plague areas 


THE REAL WAR 139 


into barracks. They have gone further, and organ- 
ized games in the poorer parts and started a play | 
center for boys; they have run unkempt, neglected 
boys into Scout Troops and made them keen foot- 
ballers. They prepared a survey of the need and 
possibilities of housing to do away with the slums 
of Kandy, and on their survey subsequent legisla- 
tion was framed and houses have already been built 
and are being built. Indeed we have the public 
statement made by the Governor of Ceylon that 
“We have the unusual occurrence of boys, while 
still at school, making the laws of their country.” 

When you look first at the races in Ceylon, India, 
Burma, the Far East, and Africa whence those 
boys come, and then at this team spirit of unity 
and service that moves them, you see that the thing 
which has made all the difference to them is the 
spirit of the college itself. And that spirit ig 
simply the spirit of the Christian men from Britain 
who in the last fifteen years have built up the tra- 
dition and esprit de corps of the place on a rock 
foundation of Christian character. 

The fact that those public schoolboys of the 
different races have bridged their race differences 
by team work in school sports, and have bridged 
class divisions in Kandy by social Service, means 
that, within the college, they have already achieved 
triumphantly the goal that—as we saw in the last 
chapter—lies ahead as our ideal. They have an 
interracial team spirit. It will be worth while to 


140 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


dig a little deeper to try to discover the force that 
has fused them into a team. We may then ask 
whether that force can really work—not simply on 
the scale of a school, but of the world. If we dis- 
covered how that force could be applied to the 
world, we should have found a way through this 
prodigious peril that rears its head in the path of 
the human race—the menace of world race war. 

Looking at the school as it throws itself into 
social service in the slums of Kandy, we discover 
that the Singhalese, British, Indians, and Africans 
are welded together by a common desire to fight— 
not with each other—but against a common enemy. 
That is, in fact, a picture of the present world race 
situation and of the way through. There is a war, 
a real war—the real war. But this real ultimate 
war is not of race against race, of self-determination 
for colored races against domination by white 
races; it is a war not of man against man, but of 
man with the deadly foes of his life. 

The nations and the races of the world—if real 
civilization is to come to the world and to triumph 
—have to lose their race differences in a real fight. 
Man has his enemies, his absolute and final enemies, 
whom he must fight tooth and nail to the last gasp, 
or himself perish. Those enemies are the low civil- 
izations that imperil the high; the greed that ex- 
ploits weaker people; the diseases that threaten 
ordered life; the personal sins that poison his soul 
and wreck his character. 


THE REAL WAR 141 


Let us look for a moment at one or two concrete, 
vivid, even painful pictures of those enemies. 

Some time ago I was living in the vastest slum in 
the world—that area which stretches for mile after 
grim desolate mile from Whitechapel in the East 
of London to South-west Ham. It was a hard, 
cold winter, its misery intensified by unemploy- 
ment. I saw men fighting with bare fists at the 
dock gates for work to get food for their boys and 
girls. For every one man who got work twenty 
were rejected. Hunger and cold stood over the 
prodigious slum like grim giants. 

Going down each night from Fleet Street to the 
University Settlement in Canning Town, I was set 
to go into scores of homes to find out who really 
needed relief—the homes of out-of-work stevedores, 
ships’ scrapers, firemen, dock laborers, skilled 
mechanics, sugar refiners, iron-workers, jam and 
matchbox-making factory girls; Negroes, Lascars, 
Danes, Indians, Chinese. 

One night, walking through the soaking snow- 
slush down a dark, forbidding road—a cul-de-sac 
—I stumbled down a black passage at the end of 
which a light glimmered through the crack of a 
doorway. I went into the desolate room. The only 
furniture was a wooden sugar-box—used as a table 
—and on it a piece of greasy newspaper with the 
bones of a few pennyworth of fried fish, and a 
smaller wooden box as a chair. With bitter sim- 
plicity the man—his lean face tense with hunger— 


142 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


told me how the room had gradually been swept 
bare of the table and chairs, clock, few pictures, 
and so on. They had all been sold or pawned to get 
food, because the man could not get work. 

“ What about bedding?” I asked. 

I found a bare iron bed, on which—with no blan- 
kets or sheets—two boys lay asleep, white and 
wizened. The man shaded the light from the boys’ 
faces with his hand, so that they might not wake to 
their hunger. The light on his lined face showed 
that unforgettable picture—tears of helpless pain 
in a man’s eyes. He had begotten the boys, but he 
could not feed them—and through no fault of his 
Own. 

The next day I looked from the roof of the Uni- 
versity Settlement House over the monotonous 
dingy sea of slum houses built on drained marshes 
down to the Tidal Basin, acre upon acre, mile upon 
mile, in long rigid rows, broken by gaunt chimneys, 
the gross mass of a gasometer, and the masts and 
funnels of tramp ships on Thames-side. Those cargo 
liners sailed to and from all the ports of the world, 
and I thought of the slums of those places—Cal- 
cutta and Cardiff, Glasgow and Kobe, Boston and 
Shanghai, Marseilles, Bombay, Hamburg and Liver- 
pool. The two boys on the bed in Canning Town 
were one with millions of boys and girls of all races 
—the eight-year-old Chinese children working on 
twelve-hour shifts in the cotton-mills of Shanghai, 


THR REAL WAR 143 


the babies dying by the thousand every year in the 
fetid human kennels of Bombay. 

The thought of this intolerable “Slaughter of 
the Innocents ” revealed in a blinding flash of light 
one of man’s menacing enemies—this grinding, 
stunting, deforming social evil, the exploitation of 
man by man for gain. We cannot fight against it 
because the money needed for social reformation 
and the minds needed for building a new order 
of life are squandered on paying for the last war 
and in the preparation of armaments for the next. 
We divide to fight one another when we should 
unite to fight our real enemy. 

Let us look at another picture. A bronzed man 
came into my room recently. He and his colleagues 
have been fighting fever in Jerusalem and the 
country round about. The most astonishing re- 
sults were achieved—by laying on fresh water from 
distant pure hill springs, by cleansing the old wells 
and cisterns of mosquito larvae, and in other ways. 
Deaths due to fever in one town were reduced in 
a single year from four hundred to four. But the 
British Government had to cut down its expendi- 
ture there because of high taxation at home to pay 
for armaments. So—for the sake of the cost of a 
single great gun—that splendid SN against dis- 
ease has been crippled. 

A few weeks later I met that daring explorer 
of the Polar Ice, Fridtjof Nansen, who has been 


144 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


fighting famine and typhus on the eastern frontiers 
of Europe. Literally he has been defending West- 
ern civilization from a ghastly scourge. But he has 
to fight as though with one hand tied behind his 
back through lack of men and money. 

Look out again at another enemy. The Western 
nations and especially those around the Pacific in 
America and Australia dread lest the low standard 
of civilization represented by the swarming fever- 
ridden alleyways of, say, Canton should over- 
whelm their civilization by the sheer flow of num- 
bers.*. That fear is partially justified. But if we 
look back we see that London in the seventeenth 
century had just such plague-ridden fcetid alley- 
ways. London’s alleys were cleansed by applied 
science and education. Our war, then, is not 
against the Asiatic, but against the filth that is as 
much his enemy as it is ours. In a word, we join 
them to fight the common enemy of man. 


The boys in that football team at Beirut were 
(we recall) of many races; but they learned to pass | 
to one another. The Asiatic, British, and African 
boys at Kandy joined together to fight disease in 
the slums. Their race differences did not stand 
in the way. They worked as one team. If we could 
swiftly fly round the world and see not only the 
present but the past students of such colleges as 
St. John’s University, Shanghai (which has sup- 


1 See Chapter II, The Dilemma of the Pacific. 


THE REAL WAR 145 


plied China from among its students with several 
Foreign Secretaries, Ambassadors, and a Prime 
Minister )—the Canton Christian College—Shan- 
tung Christian University—the Union Medical 
College, Peking—the Anglo-Chinese College, Tien- 
tsin—the Doshisha and other universities and col- 
leges in Japan—the Madras Women’s College— 
Robert College, Constantinople—and its sister at 
Scutari—Lovedale and Tigerkloof Institutions in 
South Africa—and a host of others, we should dis- 
cover one of the greatest of all new forces in the 
new world; this new young team leadership in the 
making. 

Every one who has met graduates of these and 
similar colleges has found among them men and 
women who rank with the best of any race; and in 
talk with them the sense of race division (though 
not of racial differences) disappears. They are the 
fresh leaders of a new age. 

They are at present neither many nor powerful 
as compared with the forces against them; but 
that has always been true of new and conquering 
movements. Men jeered at the meager followers of 
Mazzini hiding in garrets, but they were the fiery 
erusaders of a new and a true idea. And they won. 
The Young Italy movement freed Italy and made 
it for the first time a nation. The club cynics of 
Britain and America held their sides with guffaws 
of mirth at the odd and isolated fighters who started 
the battle for the freedom of the slaves. That 


146 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


ideal of freedom for the Negro seemed as idiotic 
to those cynics as world peace seems to ours; but 
the scorned idealists held up the banner of freedom 
against all the brickbats and bombs of detraction 
and derision. And they won. The one thing we 
need to be sure about is not that our ideal is popu- 
lar, but that it is a true one. 

So today we find this new young interracial 
leadership beginning to take the field in the new, 
war for world peace. For instance, in 1922 nine 
hundred students—men and women—of all races 
came together in Peking to discuss the question 
of world reconstruction. Called together by the 
World Student Christian Federation they came 
from almost every part of the British Empire, 
from America, from France, Scandinavia, Ger- 
many, Czecho-Slovakia, Turkey, Egypt, Africa, In- 
dia, and Japan, as well as in their hundreds from all 
over China. They found no race division separat- 
ing them. Indeed, as one of them, an Indian, put 
it when talking to an English friend: “ We (that 
is, Eastern students) were under the impression 
that Western nations were bent on exploitation 
and hence on war. This conference has given us 
the conviction that this is not so. Christian minds 
everywhere are suffering on account of this prob- 
lem. We see that they loathe war and are strug- 
gling for a better way.” 

This Indian student had discovered that the 
real war was not between the races, but was a war 


THE REAL WAR 147 


of good versus evil everywhere. The old adage of 
Confucius (which he applied to the Chinese), 
“Under heaven one family,” these students saw to 
be true of the whole human race. 

Those students of all races in Peking came to 
some burning united convictions of which the prin- 
cipal ones are these: 


We, representing Christian students from all 
parts of the world, believe in the fundamental 
equality of all the races and nations of mankind 
and consider it as part of our Christian vocation 
to express this reality in all our relationships. 


We consider it our absolute duty to do all in 
our power to fight the causes leading to war, and 
war itself as a means of settling international 
disputes.* 


The great fact is, that a new leadership for a new 
world of interracial peace is being and can increas- 
ingly be created by an education that has at its 
heart the ideal of world brotherhood. The hope 
of the world lies in the creation of this new leader- 
ship by a world-wide Christian education. 

How does this affect us? Take for instance that 
phrase in the Peking students’ declaration, “ The 
fundamental equality of all races.” We may all 
agree with those words in theory if we take “ equal- 
ity” as meaning not equality of attainment or 


1 Minute 73 of the General Committee of the World’s Student 
Christian Federation, Peking, 1922. 


148 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


identity of ability, but equality of right to a life 
of free growth in the world. But let us look at 
what that may mean for each of us individually in 
practice. Here is an actual example of an incident 
that took place in the year of writing this; an inci- 
dent which, I am told, can be paralleled in more 
than one University. 

A freshman at one of the British Universities 
made friends easily and naturally with two or 
three Indians. In a few weeks another under- 
graduate—one of his English friends in the set that 
had come up with him from the same public school 
to the same college—challenged his action. 

“ Look here,” he said, “ you have got to drop these 
Indians.” 

“Why should I?” retorted the first. 

“Well, it isn’t done,” said the other; “and any- 
how, if you don’t drop them, your old friends will 
drop you.” 

Here was a sharp decisive challenge. If he stuck 
to his guns and stood by his new Indian friends, he 
would be “barred” by his oldest friends of his 
own blood; he would be isolated; his whole future 
might be affected. But if he gave way, he would 
have been practically bullied into taking the path 
of race segregation on a basis of race inequality. 

What was he to do? The issue is difficult, some- 
times desperately difficult; and it faces students 
in the universities of many lands. It happens in 
different forms to civil servants or business men 


THE REAL WAR 149 


going to the East or Africa; or to men in any of the 
great ports of the world. 

It is one of the forms in which the race problem 
comes right home to each individual man or boy. 
To face it in the spirit of that Peking declaration is 
bound to mean sacrifice. 


II 


The unity that these boys in their colleges and 
these students from different races have discovered 
does not wipe out their distinctive racial gifts. 
Indeed, they are more splendid members of their 
own race because they play together as one man 
in one team. We lose the clue to our quest alto- 
gether if we think that we must destroy race differ- 
ence in order to solve the race problem. On the con- 
trary, every race has something special to give to 
the world that no other race possesses. When we 
talk of the unity of man, we do not mean the uni- 
formity of man. 

Race is real. It seems certain that—as Dr. 
McDougall says: 


Racial qualities both physical and mental are 
extremely stable and persistent, and if the experi- 
ence of each generation is in any manner or degree 
transmitted as modifications of the racial qualities, 
it is only in very slight degree, so as to produce 
any molding effect only very slowly and in the 
course of generations. 


150 : THE CLASH OF COLOR 


I would submit [Dr. McDougall goes on] the prin- 
ciple that, although differences of racial mental 
qualities are relatively small, so small as to be 
indistinguishable with certainty in individuals, 
they are yet of great importance for the life of 
nations, because they exert throughout many gen- 
erations a constant bias upon the development of 
their culture and their institutions. 


This, of course, does not mean that because you 
cannot change the mental qualities you cannot 
change the mental outlook. On the contrary, you 
can revolutionize the mental outlook by education. 
Two brothers, for instance, play together as boys 
in a Bechuana tribal town in Africa. One grows 
up in the hands of his witch-doctor father; he goes 
through the bestial and painful ritual of the secret 
camps where boys are equipped for manhood. The 
other meets a David Livingstone and is later edu- 
cated by the white men who come to his land with 
their schools and their new Faith. The one be- 
comes a cruel, brutal, drunken, turbulent tribes- 
man; the other becomes King Khama, the superb 
chief who found his tribe small, poor, and broken, 
and left it great, rich in cattle, and united.* 

Yet Khama did not become a European in mental 
quality: he was still the African Bantu Negro. 
Indeed, what the education and the Faith did was 
to make him the most complete, full-grown, splen- 


1See also p. 13. Khama died February 21st, 1923. 


THE REAL WAR 151 


did Bantu his race has ever seen. It thrills one to 
contemplate the possibilities that lie before man 
in the development of such personalities through 
which each of the races will give its own special 
strength to all the others. 

The Creative Power that made Man made him 
of different races—though essentially of one blood 
—for a purpose. As Dr. Aggrey? put it to me, his 
dark young face beaming, “ God knew what He was 
doing when He made me black; He wanted me to 
be black and not gray or white. I couldn’t do 
what I can do if I was any other color, and I 
don’t want to be any other color.” 

What, then, was the idea of making different 
races? 

There is nothing so flat as uniformity. The 
sound of one reiterated note is maddening. That 
is what makes us want to strangle the piano tuner. 
There is only one way to get rich full harmony 
in music or in anything else and that is by the 
blend of different notes. The thrill of a really 
great picture lies not in uniformity of color, nor 
in the clash of color, but in the complement and 
blend of contrast in color. 

The fascination even of a gallery of pictures lies 
not in their uniformity, but in their variety of color, 
spirit, and subject. To pass from the trumpet- 
blasts of Rubens’ imperial reds to the quiet tones 


1 See Chapter IIT. 


152 : THE CLASH OF COLOR 


of Rembrandt’s browns; to breathe deeply in the 
cosmic space of Michael Angelo’s thronged skies 
and then go in at the lowly door of a Teniers’ Dutch 
interior or drink in the quiet peace of a Constable, 
or trace the exquisite daintiness of Gainsborough’s 
Nelly O’Brien—that is to discover the splendid 
secret that the wonder of the unity of art lies not 
in uniformity, but in the harmonious riot of diver- 
sity, all aiming at many-colored beauty. 

Another and a perfect picture of this tremendous 
truth is that of the arms and feet, ears and eyes, 
and all the members of the body, each different 
from the other; all of varying powers; not at all 
equal in the sense of identical; yet all alike essential 
to the full body; each contributing to the body; 
and in return the body as a whole giving life and 
meaning to each member of it. 

In that story of the body and members St. Paul 
gives us in vivid imperishable prose a living picture 
of man as he may be when he realizes the unity of 
which he is the heir. There is no suggestion in St. 
Paul’s picture of equality of the limbs—or of the 
races of man—in the sense of identity or uniform- 
ity. The glory of the whole body lies precisely in 
this—that the limbs are different. But there is 
equality in the sense that each limb gives something 
unique, something that it alone can contribute. 
Robbed of any single limb or feature, however in- 
significant, the body is to that extent maimed. The 
body is simply all of the limbs (as Man is all of the 


THE REAL WAR 153 


races) “fitly framed and knit together through 
that which every joint (or race) supplies.” 

With a flash of his genius, however, the writer 
throws in at the end a phrase that flings a blaze of 
light on the picture—indeed the light reveals the 
central secret of the whole problem that we are 
facing. He says that the limbs make “ the increase 
of the body into the building up of itself in love.” 
In a word, the unity of the races of man, like that 
of the body, is not in the sheer mechanism of the 
limbs, but in the one life that throbs through them 
all—in a word the spirit. 

Botticelli’s “ Spring ” is not a meaningless jazz 
of splashes and daubs, but it is an inexhaustible 
miracle of beauty, because the colors are wrought 
into exquisite creative unity by the spirit of the 
master-hand. Bachis “ Hosanna Chorus” is not a 
ghastly crash of discords, but a harmony of per- 
fect and thrilling chords because of the master- 
spirit who created them. So the race of Man will 
leave the shattering discords and the hateful clashes 
of color that now mar his life, when the Master 
Spirit who has made Man has free play in all the 
ranges of his life. 

We are of different races, though of the same 
blood, because God meant us to be different so that 
we should each contribute to the world’s life—just 
as He meant the colors to be different that we might 
have beauty in landscape, and the sounds different 
that we might have beauty in the song of birds. 


154 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


Truth is as Beauty unconfined: 
Various as Nature is man’s Mind: 
Each race and tribe is as a flower 
Set in God’s garden with its dower 
Of special instinct; and man’s grace 
Compact of all must all embrace. 
China and Ind, Hellas or France, 
Each hath its own inheritance; 

And each to Truth’s rich market brings 
Its bright divine imaginings, 

In rival tribute to surprise 

The world with native merchandise.* 


It is this competition, not to kill, but to contrib- 
ute, this rivalry to be the best in the team and for 
the team, that is the root of progress for man on 
the planet. 

The reason why we can be certain that the differ- 
ences of race need make no discord, but can each 
contribute to a rich unity of life is this, that the 
greatest thing in man—the thing that makes him 
man and not beast—is that God made him in His 
own image and that into each man of every race He 
breathed His own Spirit. 

So we are brought again to the inevitable symbol 
of the Team; in which all work together in spon- 
taneous harmony because all the wills are set on 
one supreme aim. That aim is the glory, not of 
the individual or of the nation, but of the Team 
under the lead of its Captain—of the Family whose 
Father is God. 


1 Robert Bridges. 


THE REAL WAR 155 


Itl 


The enemy of the Team is twofold: first, the will 
to dominate; secondly, the will to isolated self- 
determination. 

It has fallen to us in this century to watch the 
most tremendous crash of historic dominations 
that man has ever seen. While Burke and Pitt 
in the time of the French Revolution exhausted the 
resources of their oratory on the horror and the 
peril of a single revolution and the collapse of a 
single throne, we have seen, in the space of sixty 
months, a stupendous intercontinental, political 
earthquake that has smashed the imperial thrones 
of Germany, Russia, Austria, and Turkey. Our 
own vision is indeed still blurred with the flying 
dust and debris of that cataclysm. The Hohen- 
zollerns and the Hapsburgs— 


whom mutual league, 
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope, 
Joynd ... once, now misery hath joynd 
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest 
From what highth fall’n. 


We have watched the Romanoffs ruthlessly ex- 
terminated and the Sultan seek an ignominious 
refuge in the Arabian desert. The most ancient 
dynasty in the world—the Manchu throne in China 
—has been wiped out and the Chinese people left 


156 ; THE CLASH OF COLOR 


to grope their way through anarchy to a new order 
of life. 

The ruin of these five thrones is a part of the 
world movement for self-determination against 
domination—a movement which is the bull in the 
world’s dynastic china shop. 

But the spirit of tyranny and race domination 
is powerful and defiant. It is like Milton’s Satan 
who, though 


Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie 
With hideous ruin and combustion down 
To bottomless perdition, 


nevertheless plots to bring Man to the same 
damnation. 


What though the field be lost? 
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, 
And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
And courage never to submit or yield. 


To men who look to gross and material things 
for the forces that control the world, reliance on 
the spirit of liberty shared by all races in coopera- 
tion, confidence in the strength of the interplay of 
a single-minded team, will sound “ wild and chi- 
merical.” They talk, with Lord Birkenhead, of the 
right of self-interest to dominate life and of “ the 
glittering prize” for the man with “the sharp 
sword.” 


THE RHBAL WAR 157% 


As Burke said, however, such men, “ vulgar and 
mechanical politicians . . . who think that nothing 
exists but what is gross and material, ... far 
from being qualified to be directors of the great 
movement of empire are not fit to turn a wheel 
in the machine. But to men truly initiated and 
rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, 
which in the opinion of such men as I have men- 
tioned have no substantial existence, are in truth 
everything and all in all.” 

Burke in immortal oratory made that appeal to 
deaf ears. The hard-headed realists—the milita- 
rists, with their faith 


In reeking tube and iron shard 


scoffed at his words and derided his idealism. 

The vengeance of history was swift and awful. 
They have the immortal shame and ignominy— 
those blood-and-thunder patriots—of having split 
their Empire and robbed it of one of the greatest, 
the fairest, the most wonderful of the world’s lands. 
For in the very year when Burke pleaded in vain 
for freedom and cooperation for the colonies, when 
he asked amid derision for reliance on “ ties which, 
though light as air, are strong as links of iron,” * 
the battle of Lexington was fought and lost by the 
British, and the war began which wrenched the 
United States of America from the Empire. 


1 Burke, Speech on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation 
with the Colonies, 1775. 


158 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


Let us, before it is too late, learn that lesson for 
the race conflict of our own day. That lesson of 
the tragic blunder of tyranny on the one hand and 
of the building power of freedom blended with co- 
operation on the other, is written across the skies 
of history in letters now of blood and fire and now 
of pure gold. There rose up in France, a decade 
later than Burke’s speech, a demand for freedom 
and power for the people. Again the military 
monarchists derided it; and the French Revolution 
came with the ruin of the throne, the spoliation of 
property, and the cold slaughter by “ Madame la 
Guillotine.” Over a century later there came once 
more the demand in Russia for the freedom of the 
people from serfdom and the granting of a place 
for them in the commonwealth. Again it was re- 
fused, and in 1917 the throne of the Tsar was flung 
to the ground; and Russia staggered to its freedom 
blindly through a blizzard of suffering. 

On the other hand, in Britain in the 1830’s the 
people clamored for new powers, and in the Reform 
Acts after an intense struggle they were called 
into expanding responsibilities; with the result 
that the land swept forward from strength to 
strength. And in the first quarter of the twentieth 
century the Dominions asked for a fuller place in 
the counsels of the Motherland and a larger free- 
dom in their own houses. It was given to them; so 
that when the awful test of world war came, 
instead of welcoming the chance of separation as 


THE REAL WAR 159 


they would have done under a tyranny, they leaped 
with all their young strength full-armed to the 
side of the Motherland. 

Today such a decisive conflict of the principles 
of domination and freedom is on us again. On the 
one side is an arrogant Goliath straddling across 
the path of progress, defying man to advance. On 
the other side is the young fresh force of coopera- 
tion—the David of this conflict—the team idea of — 
all races working together to a common end. To- 
morrow—in our time—the decision must be made. 
That decision will alter one way or the other the 
whole future history of man. 

The crisis, as we have seen, is this. The white 
races that dominate the world today are faced 
by the clamor of the colored races for a place in 
the control of the world. The American colonies in 
1775, the French populace in 1789, the English 
people in the 1830’s, the Dominions in the early 
twentieth century, and the Russian people in 1917 
asked for a growth of self-government. So the In- 
dian, the Arab, the Egyptian, and the Negro, in 
widely varying degrees, but with one voice, ask to- 
day that they should be free to use the powers that 
are in them, and by exercise to develop the muscles 
of self-government so that they may be fit for fuller 
powers still; and the Chinese and Japanese ask for 
a sharing of the surface of the world for their 
over-brimming populations. 

If the white races today deride and deny the 


160 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


claim of the colored peoples to control increasingly 
the current of their own lives; if the white man 
resists “the rising tide of color,” the breakers of 
that tide will surge and pound upon the dykes till 
they crumble and collapse. Then the noise of the 
overwhelming surges will fill the darkness of the 
world and the tide will “ sweep away all the rich 
heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The 
danger is terrible. The time is short.” * 

The white man, however, has within his grasp 
a far greater glory than defending his own author- 
ity. If he will simply set his face resolutely toward 
realizing a world commonwealth of nations and 
races, he can have the glory of leading Man at the 
supreme crisis of his history for the first time into 
world peace. 

This issue as between the two forces has been 
summed up for us by Professor Gilbert Murray. 
He says: 


The question is, which of these two contrary 
tendencies ... is going to prevail? The one is 
the economic exploitation of the helpless terri- 
tories and nations by the strong ones, a process 
which has enormous historical impetus behind it, 
and is at this moment stimulated by the exceptional 
economic hunger of the European world; the other 
is that consciousness of the Earth as One Great 
City, and that acceptance of duty towards our 


1Lord Macaulay on Parliamentary Reform. (House of Com- 
mons, 2nd March, 1831.) 


THE REAL WAR 161 


fellow-man which . . . may now be normally ex- 
pected of a civilized and educated man. ... The 
lists are already set and the issue is joined. 


The issue is joined: and we cannot refrain from 
that battle. We must, by the very fact that we are 
alive, be in it on one side or the other, by the sheer 
pressure of our own personality in the ordinary 
contracts of our day’s work. 

In the League of Nations, for instance, is a 
beginning—though not yet the complete fulfilment 
—of the idea of the Human Team. For the first 
time in history more than fifty nations are united 
for these purposes: “to promote cooperation be- 
tween nations ”* and to make “ the well-being ” of 
the races not yet able to stand alone “a sacred 
trust of civilization.” * There we see twin pillars 
of a new world order—cooperation between the 
strong and trusteeship for the weak. 

The League of Nations is in its early and ex- 
perimental form at present. It is taking its first 
steps in a new world, a world where the rumblings 
and tossings of the earthquake of world war fol- 
lowed by the tidal wave of racial ambitions make 
all steps forward difficult. Yet the League’s work 
—“ to seek the reign of law based upon the consent 
of the governed and sustained by the organized 
opinion of mankind ”—is the greatest attempt at a 

1 Essays and Addresses, 1922. 


2See Article I. 
8 See Article XXII. 


162 : THE CLASH OF COLOR 


world team of all the races that has yet been made 
in the political and social realm. 

None know better, however, than the supporters 
of the League, and none say more often or more 
emphatically, that it is not on organization alone 
but on the will of the nations and the races that 
peace can ever be built. As General Smuts has said, 
“We need a change of heart in the peoples of the 
world.” 

To change the heart of humanity is a task that 
can only be achieved by a world-wide force working 
in the spirits and the minds of men everywhere. 
It is a task of educating people of all races in a new, 
spirit. Indeed the world situation can—from this 
point of view—be summed up in H. G. Wells’s 
vivid phrase, “a race between education and 
catastrophe.” 

That task of education on a world scale may 
sound impossible. It is nothing of the kind. It 
is as practicable as it is thrilling. As we have just 
seen, it is already begun among the races of Asia 
and Africa in the new student leadership. It is 
when we look at the world of men, not as they are, 
but as knowledge and a spirit of goodwill can make 
them, that we get a glimpse of the incalculable 
good that lies ahead. 

It is a stupendous task. Like the glittering peak 
of Mount Everest, it challenges the highest strategy 
and tests lung and sinew to the limit of endurance. 
But it ought not to daunt the sons of men who haye 


THE REAL WAR 163 


crossed uncharted seas and broken into new con- 
tinents. We are in the succession to fathers who 
fought many fights for freedom, who pioneered in 
every continent; who tunneled impassable moun- 
tain barriers and drove new loads across old wastes. 
And the end of their exploration is only the begin- 
ning of blazing our new world trail. 

This new world of tomorrow is to our genera- 
tion what the Atlantic was to Grenville, Hawkins, 
Raleigh, and Drake, what the Pacific was to Cap- 
tain Cook, what Africa was to Livingstone, and the 
Poles to Shackleton, to Scott, and to Peary—it is 
the field of a new adventure; a challenge to initia- 
tive and resource; a test of capacity and will. 

As, however, we face this world task of overcom- 
ing the conflict of color by a new world spirit and 
practice of cooperation, nothing short of a world- 
wide force rooted in spiritual reality will ever 
be adequate. Something very real is needed—not 
a vague atmosphere of kindliness, but a brother- 
hood won through blood and courage and sacrifice. 

Can we anywhere find on the planet such a force 
and such a brotherhood? 


IV 


Suppose ... and suppose that a wild little Horse of 
Magic 
Came cantering out of the sky, 
With bridle of silver, and into the saddle I mounted, 
To fly—and to fly; 


164 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


and suppose that the “wild little Horse” raced 
round the world 


. . . Stretched up into the air, fleeting on in the sun- 
shine, 
A speck in the gleam 
On galloping hoofs, his mane in the wind out-flowing, 
In a shadowy stream.* 


Starting from the surf-edge of a Pacific Island 
where the day begins* and keeping pace with the 
sun, what do I see? 

I see the moving, many-colored races of men 
on whom the sun shines every day—races differing 
in a hundred ways and divided by language and cus- 
tom and costume, ideal and creed. Yet in all that 
glorious, breathless world-gallop I discover at least 
the beginnings of a world community—a new Race 
out of every race. I discover that one Person 
draws men of every race under heaven—here few 
and there many—to find in Himself the meaning of 
life and above all the express image of their Father. 
And I discover that where those men really find 
Him they find their unity with other men of any 
and every race who have learned to know Him. 

From my flying eyrie I see—on the dawn of Sun- 
day—by an island beach where the blue league- 
long rollers boom and break in white spume, the 
brown boys and girls of Fiji—the grandchildren 

1 Walter de la Mare. 


2 The international date line is 180 degrees east of Greenwich. 
Each day begins by agreement between the nations on that line. 


THE REAL WAR 165 


of cannibals—running to their schools. There they 
learn and say together sentences first spoken by a 
lakeside in western Asia which in their first two 
words reach the real root of the unity of Man— 
“Our Father.” 

Their voices die in the distance as we gallop 
southward over New Zealand, where the tall brown 
Maori men come striding to their sturdy wooden 
churches. Swiftly swinging away northwestward 
we are just in time to see the strange black aborigi- 
nes of Australia—men of the boomerang and spear 
—coming out from their huts to their simple school 
services. Leaping the Torres Straits we find full- 
grown brown Papuan boys—the sons of savages— 
walking across the wonderful cricket ground that 
they themselves laid out, and entering barefoot the 
school chapel that they have also with their own 
strong hands built to the glory of God. 

Not less breathless than our speed is the swift 
transition from the primitive stone-age simplicity 
of Papua to the ancient, chivalrous culture of 
Japan, where, in their beautiful and simple array, 
hundreds of thousands of Christian Japanese live. 
In the foul slums of Kobe I see a Kagawa, social 
reformer, author, editor, orator, pouring out his life 
for the poor and in the name of Christ fighting the 
sweating of his people. He is only one of the thou- 
sands who in the Christian Church in Japan are 
changing its life. 

In another hour we have crossed with the dawn 


166 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


the Korean Strait and find the quaintly-hatted, 
white-robed Korean folk going to their worship, 
and then the Church in Manchuria, men and women 
who have been through the fire and water of furious 
persecution, working in college, in hospital and in 
village and city—-another link in the unbroken 
chain. 

Galloping westward we leave on our left the 
jong flying squadron of island peoples—the Phil- 
ippines, the Dyaks and Chinese of Borneo, and the 
crowded brown folk of volcanic Java—and are 
swiftly careering over the vast crowded plains of 
China towards the gorges and the mountainous 
plateaus of the West. We picture to ourselves the 
far-flung, many-sided activities of the church on 
which the sun shines down each day in the life of 
China—on students from Peking University and 
the Shantung Christian University and others 
hurrying to their classes; doctors and nurses at 
work in the great mission hospitals and medical 
colleges; journalists and social workers fighting 
the sweated industries of Shanghai cotton mills; 
young Christian Chinese statesmen in the cabinet 
wrestling with the problems of the Chinese civil 
war; General Feng disciplining his armies in 
Christian chivalry; and we discover in city and 
village hundreds of thousands of folk in China 
who are a part of this world-wide community that 
shares in the Christian worship of the Father. 

The hoofs of our Horse of Magic fling the 


THE REAL WAR 167 
clouds aside as we career over Mandalay, where 


The dawn comes up like thunder, 
Out o’ China. . 


There in Burma and away on our left flank 
among the merry, nimble Siamese and in Sumatra 
and on the Malay peninsula, multitudes, brown 
and yellow, come together to the worship of the 
Christ. 

An hour later the vast white rampart of the 
Himalayas rears itself on our right. There in 
India we look across the prodigious plains of the 
Brahmaputra and the Ganges up to the Christian 
sentinel hospitals at Peshawar, Bannu, and the 
other gates of the Afghan passes. From Calcutta 
to Delhi, from Benares southward over the plains 
and on to the lovely backwaters of Travancore to 
Ceylon, the rapidly growing millions of India’s 
Christian community, students and doctors, teach- 
ers and pastors, join by their work and their wor- 
ship in carrying the chain of the Great Commu- 
nity from the Far to the Near East. 

In Madagascar the scores of thousands of Chris- 
tian Malagasy in their pure white lambas, with 
the memory of their heroic martyrs fresh in their 
minds, go out into the multitude of soaring Gothic 
buildings that express the strength and the lift of 
their devotion. 

Crossing the stupendous African continent I 
should see, along the trail left by Livingstone and 


168 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


the hero spirits who followed him, the Negro 
peoples from veldt and lakeside, forest and river 
bank, workshop and college, fields and tribal vil- 
lages, gathering in churches, that range from the 
splendid Cathedral which stands where the old 
slave market festered in Zanzibar down to mud- 
and-wattle sheds by the banks of the Congo. So 
the far-flung Community builds here the bridge 
from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, at the 
same hour when, from the Shetlands to Sicily, and 
from the steppes of Russia to the shores of France, 
the Churches of Britain and of Europe express 
their common worship. 

The wide Atlantic is taken in our stride, and the 
American churches, white and Negro, with the 
American Indians and Eskimos, carry the un- 
broken chain of worship across to the Pacific 
Ocean where foam-flecked at the end of our swift 
circuit of the world, I watch the brown laughter- 
loving island people of Samoa and of the well- 
named Friendly Islands round off by their comely 
and cheerful service the world’s worship of God. 

So the sun—as it watches the earth spinning 
through space—already sees gathered out of all 
the races of the world men born into this New 
Race, this Great Community, “the Holy Church 
throughout all the world.” Weak that Church is 
in many places, and everywhere it is far from 
being “without blemish ”; its disunion, too, is a 
cause of derision. Worse than all, it is in many 


THE REAL WAR 169 


of its branches invaded and infected with class 
conflict and race hatred. 

Yet when all is said, it has—and it alone has— 
in the measure of its real faith in the one Father 
who “made of one every nation of men for to 
dwell on all the face of the earth,” the secret of 
the power to overcome the world’s race conflicts 
and to give peace to man. 

The future of man surely lies with this World 
Community created by the Spirit of Christ. For 
it is created to bring man to God’s way—the 
Kingdom of God—the way of world fellowship in 
the spirit of His Son. Here differences of race, 
wealth, culture, status are transcended in a higher 
unity. Here is the real birth of the commonwealth 
of man. It is when we stand with St. John on 
“a great and high mountain” that we get our 
glimpse of the Holy City coming down to earth. 
We discover that the day of adventure is not dead 
in a world where the call comes to every living 
soul in this generation to challenge man’s stupen- 
dous race antagonisms with the ideal of this City 
of the World Team—this City, not of one race or 
nation, but of all humanity. 


And the nations of them which are saved 

Shall walk in the light of it: 

And the Kings of. the earth 

Do bring their glory and honor into it, 

‘And the gates of it shall not be shut at all... 
And they shall bring the glory and honor 

Of the nations into it. 








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BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Besides many well-known standard histories and works of refer- 
ence, the following books (in addition to those referred to in the 
footnotes of the text) are suggested for reading in conjunction 
with the six chapters of this book. 

Books marked M.E.M. are published by the Missionary Educa- 
tion Movement and should be ordered through denominational 
headquarters. Price: cloth, 75 cents; paper, 50 cents. 


GENERAL 


Of One Blood. Rosert KE. Speer. M.E.M. 

A powerful, well-documented introduction to the race prob- 
lem of high value for general readers and students. It 
is an abridged edition of Dr. Speer’s discussion and source 
book on the race question, Race and Race Relations. Flem- 
ing H. Revell Co., New York. 1924. $3.00. 

Christianity and the Race Problem. J. H. OLtpHAM. George H. 
Doran Co., New York. 1924. $2.25. 

Discusses the attitude Christians ought to take in regard to 
racial issues. Takes account of the biological, political, eco- 
nomic, and other aspects of the problem. 

The Direction of Human Evolution. Epwin GRANT CONKLIN. 
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. $2.50. 

Racial Relations and the Christian Ideal. A discussion course 
for college students. Committee on Christian World Educa- 
tion, 25 Madison Avenue, New York. 25 cents. 

Social Problems and the East. F. Lenwoop. United Council 
for Missionary Education, London. 


CHAPTER I 


The Western Races and the World. Edited by F. S. Marvin. 
Oxford University Press, New York. $4.20. 

The Future of Africa. Donatp Fraser. United Council for 
Missionary Education, London. 


CHAPTER II 


The New Pacific. Brunspon FietcHer. Macmillan Co., London. 
China’s Challenge to Christianity. Lucius C. Porter. M.E.M. 
China’s Real Revolution. Paut Hutcuinson. M.E.M. 

173 


174 THE CLASH OF COLOR 


In China Now. J. C. Keyte. George H. Doran Co., New York. 
$1.50. 
Some of the problems of modern China. 

China Mission Year Book. Committee of Reference and Counsel. 
25 Madison Avenue, New York. $2.50. 

China in the Family of Nations. Henry T. Hopekin. George H. 
Doran Co., New York. $2.00. 

Creative Forces in Japan. GALEN FisHER. M.E.M. 
A well-informed and helpful study of the political, industrial 
and religious forces in Japan today. 

The Real Japanese Question. Kawakami. Macmillan Co., New 
York. $1.00. 

Control of the Tropics, The. BENJAMIN Kipp. Macmillan Co., 
New York. 

Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind. 
JAMES Bryce. Oxford University Press, New York. 


CHAPTER III 


Souls of Black Folk. W. E. B. DuBois. A. C. McClurg & Co., 
Chicago. $1.20. 
Exquisitely written sketches, in which the Negro writer at- 
tempts to show what it feels like “to be black.” 

Race Problems in the New Africa. W. C. WitLoucHBY. Oxford 
University Press, New York. 

Africa—Slave or Free? J. C. Harris. Student Christian Move- 
ment, London. 

Black and White in South-East Africa. Maurice Evans. Long- 
mans, Green & Co., London. 

The Negro from Africa to America. W. D. WEATHERFORD. 
George H. Doran Co., New York. $5.00. 

Black and White in the Southern States. Maurice 8. Evans. 
Longmans, Green & Co., New York. $3.40. 

In the Vanguard of a Race. L. H. Hammonp. M.E.M. 

Darkwater. W. E. B. DuBors. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York. 
$2.00. 

Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, The. Sim FREDERICK 
LuearpD. Blackwood, London. 1922. 

Negro, The. W. E. B. DuBors. Henry Holt & Co., New York. 
50 cents. 

Opening Up of Africa, The. Sm Harry Jounston. Williams 
and Norgate, London. 

Partition and Colonization of Africa, The. Sim CHARLES LUCAS. 
Oxford University Press, New York. 1922. $4.20. 

Trend of the Races, The. Grorck E. Haynes. M.E.M. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 175 


CHAPTER IV 


India Old and New. Simm VaLentinE Currot. Macmillan Co., 
New York. $4.00. 
Christ and Labor. C. F. ANprEws. George H. Doran Co., New 


York. $1.75. 
Indian Nationalism. Epwyn Bevan. Macmillan Co., New York. 
$1.40. 


Building with India. D. J. Furmine. M.E.M. 

India on the March. ALpEN H. Crarx. M.E.M. 

India and Her Peoples. F. DEAVILLE WALKER. United Council 
for Missionary Education, London. 

The Quest of Nations T. R. W. Lunt. United Council for Mis- 
sionary Education, London. 

Reconstructing India. Str M. Visvesvanaya. P. S. King, Lon- 
don. 


Also two of the “ Modern Series of Missionary Biographies.” 
Henry Martyn. C. E. Papwick. George H. Doran Co., New York. 


$1.50 
Gives a vivid picture of India in the old days of the “Com- 
any.” 

‘Alexander Duff. W. Paton. George H. Doran Co., New York. 
$1.50. 


This Life affords an illuminating study of the problem of 
Indian education. 


CHAPTERS V AND VI 


Christianity and the Race Problem. J. H. OLDHAM. 

Of One Blood. Rosert E. Speer. M.E.M. 

The Business of Missions. CorneLrus H. Patton. Macmillan 
nt New York. Special edition through mission boards, 

1.00. 

The Rising Tide of Color. LorHror Stopparp. Charles Scribner’s 
Sons, New York. $3.00. 

The Riddle of Nearer Asia. Bast Maruews George H. Doran 
Co., New York. $1.25. 

. See especially Chapters VI (the Arab) and VII (the Jew). 

Christ and Labor. C. F. ANDREWS. 

Students and World Problems. Report of the Indianapolis Con- 
vention of the Student Volunteer Movement, 25 Madison 
Avenue, New York. $2.50. 

Mankind and the Church. Ed. by Rt. Rev. H. H. Montgomery, 
D.D. Longmans, Green & Co., New York. $2.75. 





INDEX 


iy 





INDEX 


A 


Aeroplane journeys, 8-11 
Africa, see Chap. III. 
and League of Nations, 69 
Christian institutions in, 67 
explorers in, 55-57 
labor problem, 62-64 
land problem, 64-68 
opening up of, 7, 57-58 
Pan-African Congress, 69 
part in Great War, 20 
produce of, 8, 60-63 
race antagonism, 65 et seq. 
races in, 57 
“scramble for Africa,’ 58-59 
self-determination in, 69 et 
seq. 
slave-trade in, 55-56, 58-59 
wealth of, 8, 12, 58 
Aggrey, Dr., 70-72, 75, 151 
America, United States of— 
population, 42 
race problem in, 56, 69 et seq. 
Amritsar, shooting at, 93, 95-96 
Asia, wealth of, 8, 12 
Australia, population, 40 
Prime Minister of (quoted), 


50-51 
“White Australia” policy, 
50, 119-120 


B 


Barnett, Dr. (quoted), 39 
Beirut, American University, 
110-112 
British Columbia— 
and Asiatic immigration, 45, 
§1-52 
area and resources, 41 


179 


British Commonwealth of Na- 
tions, 38, 107 
position of Indians in, 99 et 
seq. 


C 


Cesar, Julius (quoted), 129-130 
Canada, Prime Minister of 
(quoted), 51-52 
Channel Railway Ferry, 16 
China— 
Christian colleges, 35 
education, 35, 
industrialism, 32 
nationalistic movement, 35-36 
national unity of, 38-39, 85 
population, 28, 42 
student life of, 33-34, 35-36 
Chinese script, 36 
Chinese Students’ 
Movement, 35 
Cinemas in the East, 36 
Columbus, 4, 19, 56 
Cornish, Dr. Vaughan (quoted), 
131-132 


Patriotic 


D 


Diaz, Roderick, 55 
DuBois, W. E. B., 22, 73, 74 


E 


East India Company, 6, 83, 125 
Explorers— 
land-explorers, 7, 56-57 
sea-explorers, 4-5, 6-7, 27, 55 
56 


180 
F 


Feng, General, 166 
G 


Gama, Vasco da, 4, 19, 55 
Gandhi, 22, 95-98 
Garvey, Marcus, 73-74 
Great War— 
colored races in, 20 
effect on partition of Africa, 
59-60 
factor in racial upheaval, 20, 
22, 46, 65, 90-91 
India’s part in, 90-91 


I 


India, see Chap. IV. 

British Government educa- 
tion in, 85-86 

British rule in, 83 et seq. 

early race invasions, 80-81 

East India Company formed, 
83 

first General Election, 92 

industrial life, 89 

Montagu-Chelmsford Reform, 
92 

part in Great War, 20, 91 

population, 28-29 

railways, 86-87 

representation on League of 
Nations, 90, 92, 98 

signs Peace Treaty, 98 

status in British Common- 
wealth, 99-100, 107 

Industrial Revolution, 12 


J 
Japan, adoption of Western 
ways, 34, 126 


Christian colleges, 35 
educational system, 34-35 
industrialism, 32 
population, 27, 40 
victory over Russia, 20 


THE CLASH OF COLOR 


K 


Kagawa, 33, 165 
Kandy, Trinity College, 136 et 
seq. 
Kenya Colony, 63, 101, 119 
Britain’s responsibility in, 
106 
position of Indians in, 106 
Khama, 13, 62, 150 
Ku Klux Klan, 74 


L 


Lausanne, Treaty of, 23 
League of Nations, 69, 77, 161- 
162 
Africa’s mandated territories, 


India’s representation on, 90, 
92, 98 
Livingstone, David, 7, 13, 57, 
58, 60, 62, 167 
Lugard, Sir Frederick (quot- 
ed), 56, 66, 78 


M 
McDougall, Professor (quoted), 


134, 149-150 
Mill, John Stuart (quoted), 29- 
32 


Montagu-Chelmsford Reform, 
92 
Murray, Professor Gilbert 


(quoted), 160-161 


N 


Nansen, Fridtjof, 143-144 
Negro, Christian institutions, 
67, 74-75 
race consciousness, 68, 118 
New Zealand— 
population, 40-41 
Prime Minister of (quoted), 
51 


INDEX 


P 


Pacific Ocean, size, 25-26 
Pan-African Congress, 69 


R 


Race antagonism— 
causes of, 52, 114 et seq., 135 
in Africa, 65-68 
in America, 69 ef seq. 
in India, 91 et seqg., 120-121 
Race consciousness, 68, 118-119 
Race, definition of, 116 et seq. 
Race migration, 43 et seq. 
Race superiority, 124 et seq. 
Racial upheaval, 19 et seqg., 31 
et seq., 114 
Great War, a factor in, 20, 
22, 46, 65, 90-91 


s 


Self-determination, 21-22 
in Africa, 69 et seq. 
in China, 35 
in India, 92 et seq. 
Slave trade, 55-56, 58 
Smith, Ross & Keith, 8-9 
Smuts, General (quoted), 103- 
104, 162 


181 


South Africa, position of In- 
dians in, 103-105 

Stoddard, Lothrop, 118, 124 

Swaraj, 21, 91, 94, 99, 117 


sh 


Tagore, Rabindranath 
ed), 97-98 

Teleopsis, 16 

Trinity College, Kandy, 136 e¢ 
seq. 


(quot- 


Vv 


Victoria, Queen, Empress of 
India, 83-84 


W 


Washington, Booker, 66-67, 74 
“White Australia” policy, 50, 
119-120 
White domination, 10-11 
challenge of, 20-21, 22-238, 72- 
73 
White expansion, 3-8 
causes of, 11-17 
Wireless, 8, 13-16, 88, 125 
World’s Student Christian Fed 
eration, Peking, 146-147 
World transport, 8, 12, 17 


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